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ur  Total  Christianity 


CHARLES    REYNOLDS    BROWN 


Our  Totai  Christianity 


BY 

CHARLES    REYNOLDS    BROWN 

AUTHOR  OF 

FAITH  AND  HEALTH,    THE  YOUNG  MAN-S  AFFAIRS,    THE  SOCIAL 
MESSAGE  OF  THE  MODERN  PULPIT,     THE  MAIN  POINTS,  ETC. 


This  series  of  seven  sermons  was  delivered 
on  seven  Sunday  evenings  in  the  First 
Congregational  Church,  Oakland,  California. 


WOOD  &  COWDREY 

Publishers 
876  Broadway,   Oakland,  Cal. 

PROGRESS   PRESS   PRINT 

March,  1910 


„ 

.          , 

• 
. 


When  these  addresses  were  given  in  the  First 
Congregational  Church  of  Oakland,  California, 
the  three  hymns  sung  at  each  service  were 
selected  from  hymn  writers  belonging  to  the 
particular  denomination  to  be  considered  that 
evening. 

It  is  an  interesting  and  significant  fact  for 
the  cause  of  Christian  unity  that  these  many 
hymns,  written  by  members  of  these  different 
communions,  were  all  contained  in  the  "Ply- 
mouth Hymnal' '  in  use  in  the  church  where  the 
addresses  were  given — as  indeed  they  would  be 
found  in  almost  any  standard  hymnal.  Doc- 
trinal discussions  may  divide  us,  but  we  all 
come  together  in  prayer  and  in  praise. 

The  list  of  these  various  hymns  may  be  of 
interest  to  those  who  read  this  book. 


3GOG13 


BAPTIST. 

Softly  fades  the  twilight  ray. 
I  need  Thee  every  hour. 
Blest  be  the  tie  that  binds. 

EPISCOPAL. 

0  little  town  of  Bethlehem. 
The  Church's  one  foundation. 

For  all  the  saints  who  from  their  labors 
rest. 

METHODIST. 

Love  divine  all  love  excelling. 
Jesus  lover  of  my  soul. 
A  charge  to  keep  I  have. 

PRESBYTERIAN. 

1  heard  the  voice  of  Jesus  say. 
Go  labor  on,  spend  and  be  spent. 
Stand  up,  stand  up  for  Jesus. 

ROMAN  CATHOLIC. 

Lead  Kindly  Light. 

Jesus.  Thou  joy  of  loving  hearts. 

Jerusalem  the  golden. 

UNITARIAN. 

Again  as  evening's  shadow  falls. 
In  the  Cross  of  Christ  I  glory. 
Nearer  my  God  to  Thee. 

CONGREGATIONAL. 

My  faith  looks  up  to  Thee. 

I  love  thy  kingdom,  Lord. 

0  Master  let  me  walk  with  Thee. 


TABLE    OF    CONTENTS 

I.  THE   BAPTIST  PART 

II.  THE   EPISCOPAL   PART 

III.  THE    METHODIST  PART 

IV.  THE    PRESBYTERIAN    PART 

V.  THE   ROMAN   CATHOLIC   PART 

VI.  THE  UNITARIAN    PART 

VII.  THE  CONGREGATIONAL   PART 


THE  BAPTIST  PART 


O 


UR  total  Christianity  is  a  very  large  affair. 
"Like  a  mighty  army  moves  the  church  of 
God."  It  is  not  all  Infantry,  nor  all  Artil- 
lery, nor  all  Cavalry,  nor  all  Red  Cross,- 
each  one  of  these  arms  of  a  common  service  is  useful 
in  its  own  way. 

And  because  Christianity  is  large  and  diversified 
it  is  good  now  and  then  for  a  man  to  move  out  of 
his  own  particular  corner  of  the  field  and  take  a  look 
at  the  army  as  a  whole.  It  is  good  for  him  to  get 
something  of  the  swing  and  movement  of  these  far- 
flung  and  variously  formulated  efforts  to  have  right- 
eousness and  peace  and  joy  bear  rule.  It  will  have 
a  tendency  to  lift  him  out  of  the  pettiness  and 
meagerness  into  which  the  best  of  us  sometimes  fall 
and  to  bestow  upon  him  some  of  the  breadth  and 
bigness,  some  of  the  sympathy  and  catholicity  of 
spirit  which  belong  to  citizenship  in  the  Kingdom 
of  God. 

It  is  well  for  an  individual  Christian  to  occasional- 
ly take  another  man's  gait.  There  are  bodies  of 
Christians  who  move  always  in  a  regular  and  digni- 
fied walk — the  Presbyterians,  for  example,  in  the 


8  OUR    TOTAL   CHRISTIANITY 

general  quality  of  their  church  life  have  learned  to 
"walk  and  not  faint.'  There  are  others  who  oc- 
casionally strike  a  round  trot,  and  others,  less  con- 
ventional in  their  methods,  are  accustomed  to  pace, 
while  some  even  break  into  a  splendid  gallop.  Well 
and  good — if  they  are  only  headed  right,  God  be 
praised  for  this  variety  of  movement !  And  for  the 
man  who,  on  the  whole,  prefers  his  own  gait,  it  is  de- 
sirable that  for  an  hour  he  should  catch  some  other 
man's  mood  and  movement — he  will  come  back  to 
his  own  place  in  the  procession  a  more  limber  and  a 
more  useful  Christian. 

The  purpose  of  this  series  of  addresses  is  not  con- 
troversial. If  I  could  not  find  anything  to  speak  about 
for  seven  Sunday  evenings  except  to  make  a  series 
of  attacks  upon  my  fellow  Christians  in  those  other 
camps,  I  should  certainly  stop  preaching  and  under- 
take to  earn  my  living  in  some  more  reputable  way. 
In  the  newspapers  much  is  made  oftentimes  of  "the 
divisions  of  Christendom,'  but  these  jokers  know 
not  what  they  say.  The  divisions  on  the  face  of  them 
are  many,  but  the  agreements  are  more  numerous 
and  more  significant.  And  the  deeper  meaning  of 
these  divisions  lies  in  the  fact  that  each  group  of 
Christians  which  has  any  right  to  be,  has  made  some 
special  and  characteristic  contribution  to  the  total 
Christianity. 

There  are  bigots  and  sectarians  who  do  not  view 
the  matter  in  this  way.  They  are  so  taken  up  with 
the  beauties  of  their  owrn  little  cob-houses  of  doc- 


THE    BAPTIST    PART  9 

trine  and  polity  and  ritual  that  they  have  no  ad- 
miration left  for  anything  outside.  They  have  no 
admiration  for  the  great  cathedral-like  structure  of 
Christian  faith  and  worship  and  life  with  its  nave 
and  choir,  its  added  transepts  and  out-reaching 
chapels  representing  a  long  and  varied  process  of 
growth.  But  there  are  not  many  of  these  precious 
bigots  left  and  they  do  not  count  for  much  even 
in  their  own  denominations.  The  theology,  the 
polity  and  the  worship  of  one  branch  of  the  church 
are  not  roomy  enough  to  include  all  the  facts  of 
human  nature,  to  say  nothing  of  drawing  a  com- 
plete circle  around  the  divine  love.  We  wish  to 
stand  for  these  evenings  in  the  presence  of  that 
larger  Christianity  which  shall  more  completely  com- 
mand the  admiration  and  allegiance  of  our  hearts. 
In  this  series  of  addresses  then  I  will  ask  vou  to 

*> 

look  at  seven  of  the  leading  branches  of  the  Christian 
Church,  the  Baptist,  Episcopal,  Methodist,  Presby- 
terian, Roman  Catholic,  Unitarian  and  Congregation- 
al churches.  I  have  simply  arranged  them  in  alpha- 
betical order,  except  that  I  have  left  my  own  to  the 
last.  There  are  other  branches  of  the  church  which 
are  larger  numerically  than  some  that  I  have  named. 
The  Campbellite,  or  Christian  denomination,  for 
example,  is  much  larger  than  three  of  the  ones  named 
-but  it  is  so  much  like  the  Baptist  Church  in  its 
general  methods  that  it  did  not  seem  to  demand 
separate  consideration.  The  Lutheran  Church  is  a 
large  body,  but  its  general  position  is  so  much  like 


10  OUK    TOTAL   CHK1STIANITY 

that  of  the  Presbyterian  Church  that  its  contribu- 
tion will  easily  be  considered  under  that  head.  I 
have  selected  these  seven  because  they  are  the  best 
known  and  because  each  one  in  my  judgment  has 
made  some  distinctive  contribution  to  our  total  Chris- 
tianity. If  in  the  spirit  of  intellectual  hospitality 
we  may  undertake  this  consideration,  we  shall  bring 
back  bits  of  information,  stirrings  of  sympathy, 
wiser  judgments  and  refreshing  breezes  from  other 
quarters  of  the  infinite  heaven  of  spiritual  forces 
which  will  inevitably  broaden  and  inspire  us  all  to 
a  finer  and  fuller  service  of  our  common  Lord. 

The  name  "Baptist"  dates  back  to  about  the  year 
1G64.  It  is  applied  to  a  certain  body  of  Christians 
because  of  the  peculiar  emphasis  they  lay  upon  the 
mode  and  upon  the  proper  subjects  of  bap- 
tism. They  insist  that  the  literal  meaning 
of  the  Greek  word  Baptize  is  "to  dip,'  and 
that  inasmuch  as  baptism  by  the  immersion 
of  the  whole  body  in  water  was  common, 
if  not  universal  in  Christ's  day,  this  mode  is  the 
one  acceptable  mode  of  administering  that  sacra- 
ment. They  also  insist  that  the  church  should  be 
composed  only  of  regenerate  believers ;  and  that  only 
people  sufficiently  mature  to  make  conscious  ac- 
ceptance of  Christ  as  their  Savior  can  therefore 
rightly  be  admitted  to  the  church  through  the  ordi- 
of  baptism  They  therefore  do  not  practice 


THE    BAPTIST   PART  11 

the  baptism  of  children  as  is  done  in  the  larger  part 
of  the  Church  of  Christ. 

I  shall  not  discuss  either  of  these  claims.  There 
are  many  of  us  who  believe  as  Dean  Stanley  did 
that  the  mode  of  baptism  in  the  first  century  was 
commonly  if  not  universally  by  immersion,  and  who 
believe  also  that  the  departure  from  that  mode, 
which  occurred  very  early  and  which  has  come  to 
prevail  so  widely,  represents  for  colder  regions 
where  different  styles  of  dress  obtain,  "the  triumph 
of  convenience  and  good  taste  over  a  literal  attach- 
ment to  ancient  custom.'  But  I  am  not  here  to 
argue  the  differing  claims  as  to  the  mode  or  the 
subjects  of  baptism,  but  to  undertake  rather  to 
indicate  the  distinctive  contribution  made  by  this 
body  of  Christians  to  our  total  Christianity. 

These  seem  to  me  to  lie  in  three  directions — first, 
in  their  intense  loyalty  to  personal  conviction.  Our 
good  friends  in  the  Baptist  Church  believe  that  Jesus 
Christ  was  baptized  by  immersion  in  the  river  Jor- 
dan. They  believe  that  the  early  Christians  were 
thus  baptized  by  the  apostles.  They  believe  it  is 
essential  that  in  this  far-off  land  and  time  every 
believing  Christian  should  be  baptized  in  the  same 
way.  Because  of  their  loyalty  to  this  conviction 
they  are  ready  to  make  all  necessary  sacrifices  in 
maintaing  that  mode. 

This  loyalty  to  conviction  becomes  oftentimes  a 
serious  handicap.  In  a  warm  country  like  Palestine 
where  most  of  the  people  lived  near  running  streams, 


12  OUR   TOTAL   CHRISTIANITY 

where  the  loose  outer  garments  could  be  readily  laid 
aside  without  unseemliness  or  immodesty,  the  custom 
of  immersion  was  one  thing.  In  colder  countries 
where  water  must  be  artifically  heated  in  tanks  or 
where  people  in  the  country  must  go  to  ponds  or 
to  streams  and  in  the  winter  season  cut  holes  through 
the  ice  in  order  to  perform  this  rite  in  that  way,  and 
where  the  style  of  dress  is  such  as  to  involve  much 
inconvenience  and  discomfort,  immersion  is  quite 
another  thing.  "Well  and  good,'  the  Baptists  say 
-"even  though  we  find  ourselves  in  many  cases 
compelled  to  overcome  a  measure  of  reluctance  on 
the  part  of  thousands  of  people  to  that  mode  of 
baptism,  we  believe  it  to  be  right  and  we  gladly 
accept  that  difficulty.' 

However,  the  rest  of  the  Christian  world  may 
differ  with  them  as  to  the  importance  of  that  par- 
ticular mode  of  baptism,  we  cannot  but  admire  their 
intense  loyalty  to  conviction.  I  have  been  present, 
as  no  doubt  many  of  you  have  been,  at  baptisms 
in  country  places  where  candidates  for  baptism  were 
driven  several  miles  from  their  homes  in  the  coldest 
weather,  where  a  hole  had  been  cut  through  the 
ice  and  where  believers  were  immersed  in  freezing 
water  and  were  then  compelled  to  drive  several  miles 
to  the  nearest  house  to  secure  a  change  of  clothing. 
And  the  physical  discomfort  was  accepted  as  a  mat- 
ter of  course  in  no  spirit  of  complaint  but  as  an  op- 
portunity for  bearing  witness  to  their  faith  in  Christ. 
Let  that  loyalty  to  conviction,  that  tenacity  of  pur- 


THE    BAPTIST   PART  13 

pose  extend  to  matters  which  seem  to  us  more  vital 
than  the  mode  of  baptism,  as  indeed  it  has  in  large 
measure  extended  among  the  Christians  of  that  faith, 
and  one  can  see  what  a  power  for  good  it  may  be- 
come !  Let  loyalty  to  conviction  be  directed  to  the 
consecration  of  one's  powers  to  Christian  service, 
to  the  devotion  of  one's  means  to  benevolence  and 
to  the  development  of  a  sincere  attachment  to  the 
church  of  one's  choice  and  it  will  become  a  mighty 
influence  for  good! 

Great  emphasis  is  laid  among  the  Baptists  upon 
the  sacredness  of  the  individual  conscience.  This 
lies  at  the  root  of  their  refusal  to  baptize  children. 
The  helpless  child  must  not  be  carried  into  the 
church  and  there  baptized  by  sprinkling,  or  by  im- 
mersion for  that  matter — this  Avould  equally  offend 
their  sense  of  right.  We  must  wait  until  the  con- 
scious moral  life  of  this  child  has  taken  shape  and 
has  made  its  own  choice  as  to  the  mode  of  baptism, 
until  it  has  made  a  personal  decision  as  to  the  whole 
question  of  Christian  worship  and  service.  "Every- 
one of  us  shall  give  an  account  of  himself  to  God, ' 
is  a  favorite  text  with  the  Baptists,  and  their  very 
insistence  upon  the  right  and  obligation  of  individ- 
ual judgment  in  all  matters  of  religion  has  helped 
to  develop  that  intense  loyalty  to  personal  convic- 
tion. 

The  second  contribution  may  be  found  in  the 
simplicity  of  their  creed.  For  more  than  a  century 
they  had  no  formulated  creed  at  all.  They  simply 


14  OUB   TOTAL  CHRISTIANITY 

referred  believers  to  the  Bible.  Even  now  they  have 
no  authoritative  creed  statements  or  symbols.  What  is 
known  as  the  '  *  New  Hampshire  Confession  of  Faith ' 
is  widely  published  throughout  the  north,  and  an- 
other known  as  the  "Philadelphia  Confession  of 
Faith'  is  current  through  the  south.  But  these 
statements  are  for  instruction  rather  than  for  en- 
forcement. They  are  not  binding  in  the  sense  that 
the  Thirty-nine  Articles  of  the  Episcopal  church  or 
the  Twenty-five  Articles  of  the  Methodist  Church 
or  the  Westminster  Confession  in  the  Presbyterian 
Church  are  binding  upon  the  teachers  of  religion  in 
these  bodies.  The  creed  of  the  Baptists  is  the  Bible, 
and  they  have  not  undertaken  to  formulate  its  teach- 
ings in  any  authoritative  creed  statements. 

Two  of  the  points  which  come  in  for  special  em- 
phasis in  this  church  are  indicated  in  their  favorite 
text — "He  that  believeth  and  is  baptized  shall  be 
saved.'  He  that  believes,  not  certain  creed  state- 
ments contained  in  the  Thirty-nine  Articles  or  in  the 
Westminster  Confession;  he  that  believes  on  Christ, 
in  His  gospel,  in  His  purposes  for  the  world,  and  is 
ready  to  bear  witness  to  that  belief  in  baptism,  shall 
be  saved.  The  inner  attitude  of  the  moral  nature 
toward  Christ  and  the  open  confession  of  that  atti- 
tude in  baptism  are  the  two  essentials  for  salvatiou. 
As  compared  with  the  elaborate  dogmas  of  some 
branches  of  the  Christian  church,  there  is  among  the 
Baptists  great  simplicity  of  creed. 

The  very  simplicity  and  comprehensiveness  of  this 


THE    BAPTIST   PART  15 

basis  has  given  them  a  certain  facility  in  securing 
and  utilizing  men  of  striking  personality  and  of  un- 
conventional methods  as  ministers  of  their  faith. 
Take  five  men,  well  known  to  our  own  generation- 
Charles  H.  Spurgeon  of  London,  George  C.  Lorimer 
of  Boston,  Russell  H.  Conwell  of  Philadelphia,  P.  S. 
Henson  of  Chicago  and  Robert  J.  Burdette  of  Los 
Angeles.  All  extraordinary  men,  and  all  useful 
Baptist  preachers! 

Spurgeon  preached  to  more  people  than  any 
other  man  of  the  Nineteenth  Century.  He  preached 
to  seven  thousand  of  them  Sunday  after  Sunday  in 
his  own  Tabernacle,  there  in  South  London.  His 
sermons  were  printed  in  pamphlets  and  in  book 
form,  and  are  being  printed  yet,  although  he  has 
been  dead  nearly  twent}^  years,  and  the  circulation 
of  them  has  extended  into  millions  of  copies.  He 
was  in  no  sense  a  scholar* — he  knew  nothing  of  the 
Bible  critically,  nor  of  church  history,  nor  of  philos- 
ophy. But  "he  believed  what  he  believed,  and  for 
the  man  whose  main  business  it  is  to  produce  faith 
in  other  men  this  is  more  valuable  than  all  technical 
scholarship.'  He  proclaimed  Christ  and  Him  cru- 
cified with  wonderful  effect.  He  was  unconvention- 
al— he  would  joke  in  the  pulpit;  he  would  shock  the 
taste  of  his  hearers ;  when  preaching  about  hell  and 
certain  other  doctrines  he  would  indulge  in  language 
so  extravagant  that  we  would  scarcely  credit  it  did 
we  not  find  it  in  print  in  volumes  published  under 
his  own  supervision.  But  he  knew  the  common  peo- 


16  OUK    TOTAL   CHRISTIANITY 

pie  and  they  knew  him.  He  won  thousands  of  them 
to  Christian  life  and  service.  He  accomplished  re- 
sults in  which  every  thoughtful  Christian  rejoices. 
His  later  life  was  somewhat  clouded  by  the  fact  that 
he  felt  the  Baptist  denomination  was  becoming  too 
liberal  in  its  views  on  the  fall  of  man,  the  atonement, 
the  inspiration  of  the  Bible  and  the  fate  of  the 
wicked,  and  consequently  he  withdrew  from  the  Bap- 
tist Union.  During  the  latter  part  of  his  ministry 
he  and  his  church  stood  alone,  but  his  bow  abode  in 
strength,  and  his  power  of  appeal  wras  mighty. 

George  C.  Lorimer,  for  many  years  pastor  of  Tre- 
rnont  Temple  Baptist  Church  in  Boston,  was  an  Irish- 
man, a  little  over  five  feet  high,  with  a  voice  like 
the  filing  of  a  hand-saw.  He  was  equally  unconven- 
tional but  he  gained  for  himself  a  wide  hearing, 
especially  from  the  non-church  going  public.  His 
message  was  direct  and  it  found  response  in  the 
hearts  of  men.  He  had  an  immense  influence  for 
good  among  those  who  were  untouched  by  the  more 
conventional  methods  of  religious  effort. 

Russell  H.  Conwell,  whose  lecture  on  "Acres  of 
Diamonds'  has  been  given  some  eight  thousand 
times,  earning  for  him  a  large  amount  of  money, 
which  he  has  promptly  put  back  into  the  philan- 
thropic work  of  his  own  church,  is  one  of  the  most 
striking  figures  in  the  modern  pulpit,  His  work  in 
the  Temple  Baptist  Church  in  Philadelphia,  especially 
in  the  educational  and  social  facilities  offered  to 


THE    BAPTIST   PART  17 

young  men  and  young  women  unable  to  go  to  college, 
has  been  greatly  blessed. 

P.  S.  Henson  of  Chicago  built  up  a  tremendous 
congregation  and  by  his  exceptional  powers  of 
speech,  which  remained  with  him  until  he  was  almost 
eighty  years  of  age,  successfully  occupied  a  large 
field  of  usefulness  in  that  busy  city. 

And  "Bob  Burdett"  in  Los  Angeles,  widely  known 
as  a  newspaper  man  and  a  humorist,  has  consecrated 
his  abilities  in  these  later  years  to  the  work  of  the 
ministry  at  the  Temple  Auditorium  and  thus  became 
an  effective  preacher  of  the  gospel  in  that  southern 
city.  The  very  simplicity  and  breadth  of  their  creed 
basis  has  given  the  Baptists  special  facility  in  en- 
listing men  of  striking  personality. 

The  third  contribution  has  been  in  their  strong 
insistence  upon  the  entire  separation  of  church  and 
state.  This  separation  of  civil  and  religious  author- 
ity may  seem  to  many  people  in  this  country  like 
one  of  those  things  which  goes  without  saying,  but 
it  has  not  always  been  so  and  it  is  not  so  now  in 
other  lands.  "Render  unto  Caesar  the  things  which 
are  Caesar's"  but  only  the  things  which  are  Caesar's 
-this  has  been  the  steady  contention  of  the  Baptist 
in  all  lainds  and  in  all  times. 

Roger  Williams,  one  of  the  early  Baptist  heroes 
in  this  country,  was,  not  driven  out  of  Massachus- 
etts because  he  was  the  apostle  of  religious  tolerance 
or  because  of  any  special  religious  tenets  he  held.  At 
that  time  he  was  not  even  a  Baptist  for  he  was 


18  OUR    TOTAL  CHRISTIANITY 

immersed  after  he  went  to  Ehode  Island.  He  was 
driven  out  because  of  his  extreme  individualism  in 
insisting  upon  the  separation  of  church  and  state. 
As  soon  as  he  landed  he  stirred  up  trouble  by  urging 
that  the  Christians  of  Massachusetts  should  join  in 
an  act  of  public  repentance  for  having  communed 
with  the  Church  of  England,  which  was  a  state 
church.  He  wrote  against  the  Massachusetts  Patent 
claiming  the  King  of  England  had  no  right  to  grant 
land  to  the  colonists.  He  censured  the  Colony  for 
requiring  oaths  from  citizens  on  the  ground  that  to 
exact  an  oath  from  an  unregenerate  person  involved 
the  sin  of  taking  G-od's  name  in  vain.  He  denied 
any  power  to  the  civil  magistrate  in  matters  of  re- 
ligious faith.  This  was  not  acceptable  to  the  people 
of  Massachusetts  Bay  at  that  time.  They  still  main- 
tained a  close  relation  between  church  and  state. 
Thus  Koger  Williams  was  unacceptable  to  them  and 
he  was  invited  to  leave  as  a  troublesome  agitator.  He 
went  to  Providence,  was  immersed,  became  a  Baptist 
and  founded  Rhode  Island,  the  first  state  in  the 
Union  to  guarantee  entire  religious  freedom. 

It  was  a  protest  sorely  needed  in  that  day.  Mas- 
sachusetts had  passed  laws  against  Baptists  because 
of  their  attitude  touching  these  matters  in  1644,  had 
imprisoned  them  in  1651  and  banished  them  in  1669. 
This  was  religious  persecution  by  civil  authority, 
which  the  Baptists  have  always  opposed.  New  York 
did  the  same  thing  and  so  did  Virginia.  The  Pro- 
testant churches  of  Zurich,  Switzerland,  having  just 


THE    BAPTIST   PART  19 

won  their  own  liberty  and  still  in  dread  of  Rome, 
nevertheless  passed  an  ordinance  that  any  minister 
administering  the  rite  of  baptism  by  immersion 
should  be  drowned — with  some  idea  of  poetic  jus- 
tice perhaps,  making  the  punishment  fit  the  crime. 
And  they  actually  executed  that  sentence  against 
one  Felix  Mantz,  a  Baptist  minister,  by  drowning 
him  in  the  lake. 

In  the  year  1863,  the  new  code  of  the  State  of 
Georgia  provided  in  Section  1376  that  "it  should 
be  unlawful  for  any  church  or  society  to  license  any 
slave  or  free  person  of  color  to  preach  or  exhort  or 
otherwise  officiate  in  church  meetings. '  This  aroused 
the  Baptists  of  that  state.  They  declared  that  it 
was  seizing  by  force  the  things  that  are  God's  and 
rendering  them  unto  Caesar.  They  insisted  in  a 
communication  to  the  legislature  that  the  State  of 
Georgia  was  undertaking  to  dictate  to  the  Almighty 
what  color  his  preachers  should  be.  And  they  an- 
nounced that  even  with  such  an  enactment  before 
their  eyes  they  would  ordain  negroes  to  the  minis- 
try if  they  were  godly  men.  They  then  proceeded 
to  ordain  two,  and  the  protest  of  those  southern 
Baptists  became  so  effective  that  the  effending  sec- 
tion was  at  once  repealed. 

In  England  at  this  hour  John  Clifford,  a  Baptist 
minister,  is  one  of  the  forces  to  be  reckoned  with 
politically.  He  is  a  great  tribune  of  the  people,  a 
voice  for  the  non-conformist  conscience  of  Great 
Britain.  He  supported  Gladstone,  opposed  the  Boer 


20  OUR   TOTAL   CHRISTIANITY 

war,  fought  the  brewers  when  they  lined  up  with 
the  Lords,  opposed  the  Education  Act,  urged  the 
dis-establishment  of  the  church.  He  helped  in  the 
triumph  of  the  Liberal  party  in  1906,  the  party 
just  returned  to  power,  representing  the  people 
as  against  the  interests  and  the  hereditary  aristoc- 
racy. When  I  was  in  England  a  year  ago  I  heard 
him  speak  repeatedly  at  great  public  demonstrations 
in  Hyde  Park  and  elsewhere  and  I  could  understand 
how  in  that  land  of  tradition,  of  class  feeling,  of 
close  connection  between  church  and  state,  he  had 
become  a  mighty  influence  for  good  by  his  steady 
insistence  upon  this  fundamental  Baptist  principle 
of  entire  separation  of  civil  and  religious  authority. 

The  history  of  the  Baptist  people  in  regard  to 
missionary  effort  has  been  a  curious  one.  When 
the  idea  of  sending  missionaries  to  foreign  lands 
was  first  suggested,  it  split  the  church.  The  anti- 
missionary  party  said  'If  God  wants  the  heathen 
converted  he  will  convert  them  without  our  help.' 
And  because  of  their  extreme  Galvanism  they  said 
that  the  missionary  societies  would  be  "an  unjus- 
tifiable encroachment  upon  the  divine  sovereignty/ 
for  God  by  his  eternal  decrees  had  determined  from 
all  eternity  who  should  be  saved  and  who  should 
be  lost.  And  the  Baptists  who  held  this  view  split  off 
arid  became  a  separate  denomination. 

But  the  missionary  spirit  grew  and  "the  mission- 
ary Baptists'  were  the  first  in  England  to  organize 
a  missionary  society  and  in  1793  William  Carey  went 


THE    BAPTIST   PART  21 


out  to  become  one  of  the  noblest  missionaries  in  the 
history  of  India.  In  1812  Adoniram  Judson,  who 
was  a  Congregationalist  and  was  sent  out  by  the 
American  Board,  changed  his  views  on  baptism  dur- 
ing the  voyage  and  reaching  Calcutta  became  a  wide- 
ly known  and  honored  missionary  of  the  Baptist 
denomination  in  that  land.  And  the  world-wide, 
generous  interest  of  the  Baptist  people  in  missionary 
enterprises  has  been  a  leading  note  in  their  church 
life  for  the  last  hundred  years. 

It  was  Macaulay  who  said  "  There  were  many 
cultured  minds  during  the  latter  part  of  the  Seven- 
teenth Century,  but  only  two  great  creative  minds, 
one  of  them  the  author  of  Paradise  Lost  and  the 
other  the  author  of  Pilgrim's  Progress.'  John  Bun- 
yan,  the  author  of  Pilgrim's  Progress,  was  a  Bap- 
tist preacher  and  the  gospel  he  preached  may  be  fitly 
indicated  in  the  simplicity  of  this  phrase — "He  that 
believeth  and  is  baptized  shall  be  saved.'  Let  the 
individual  attitude  toward  Christ  be  one  of  per- 
sonal trust  and  loyalty,  let  that  attitude  bear  its 
testimony  in  the  act  of  baptism  and  the  soul  will 
find  acceptance  with  God ! 


THE  EPISCOPAL  PART 


T 


I    I 


HE  full  legal  title  of  the  Episcopal  Church 
tells  us  something  of  its  attitude  and  of 
its  history — "The  Protestant  Episcopal 
Church  in  the  United  States  of  America.' 
This  name  distinguishes  it  from  those  Christians 
who  acknowledge  the  supremacy  of  the  Pope  at 
Rome  on  the  one  hand  and  from  those  Christians 
who  are  not  governed  by  bishops  on  the  other;  it 
also  indicates  that  it  is  a  branch  of  the  older  church, 
the  Church  of  England,  adjusted  to  the  needs  of  this 
particular  country. 

The  Protestant  Episcopal  Church  in  the  United 
States  of  America !  It  is  a  long  and  somewhat  awk- 
ward title.  Many  efforts  have  been  made  by  the 
members  of  this  communion  to  have  it  changed. 
There  are  those  who  would  like  to  call  themselves 
'  The  American  Church, ' '  but  this  has  been  opposed 
by  the  broader-minded  men  among  them  as  being 
decidedly  bigoted,  for  it  is  neither  the  largest,  the 
oldest  nor  the  most  useful  of  the  various  churches 
in  America.  Such  a  title  would  prove  an  embarrass- 
ment even  as  the  name  "The  Christian  Church,' 
which  was  assumed  by  the  followers  of  Alexander 
Campbell,  has  been  a  hindrance  to  them — "The 


THE  EPISCOPAL  PART  23 

Christian  Church,"  as  if  the  other  churches  were  not 
Christian,  but  were  made  up  of  some  sort  of  heathen. 
No  satisfactory  name  has  been  found  by  the  Epis- 
copalians and  so  the  legal  title  of  the  church  stands 
as  indicated  above. 

The  three  distinctive  contributions  made  by  this 
body  of  Christians  to  our  total  Christianity  have 
been  these — they  have  indicated  clearly  the  value  of 
system.  "Let  all  things  be  done  decently  and 
in  order,'  in  good  taste  and  in  a  systematic  way! 
Nothing  is  left  at  loose  ends  among  them.  The 
Episcopal  Church  with  its  three  orders  of  ministers, 
bishops,  priests  and  deacons;  with  its  wardens  and 
vestrymen  among  the  laity,  and  with  its  many  care- 
fully constituted  societies,  is  a  highly  organized 
body. 

The  minister  is  not  left  to  work  out  the  ill-con- 
sidered ongoings  of  his  own  individual  preferences 
and  eccentricities.  The  church  puts  into  his  hand 
a  'Book  of  Common  Prayer,'  indicating  what  he 
is  to  say  when  he  prays.  It  prescribes  the  scripture 
lessons  which  he  shall  read  in  public  on  each  Sun- 
day of  the  year.  Its  well-defined  Church  Year,  with 
the  Gospel  and  the  epistle  for  the  clay,  indicates  the 
general  program  for  his  sermons.  The  choir  is  not 
left  free  to  introduce  as  it  may  please  any  piece  of 
pious  doggerel  set  to  religious  ragtime  or  to  some 
love  song,  as  is  done  in  some  quarters.  The  Te 
Deum,  the  Venite,  the  Benedictus  and  the  other 


24  OUR    TOTAL   CHRISTIANITY 


offices  of  this  church  hold  the  music  up  to  a  high 
and  dignified  standard. 

The  church  year  itself,  following  in  its  lessons  and 
in  the  other  appointments  for  the  day  the  main 
events  of  Christ's  life,  is  one  fine  illustration  of  the 
value  of  system.  About  the  first  of  December  comes 
the  season  of  Advent,  leading  the  people  to  think 
upon  the  power  of  scripture,  the  value  of  the  ministry 
and  the  preparations  for  the  coming  of  Christ.  Dur- 
ing the  Christmas  season  they  think  upon  the  nativity 
of  Christ,  upon  the  mystery  of  childhood,  the  duty 
of  parents,  and  the  dignity  of  human  life,  as  taught 
in  the  doctrine  of  the  Incarnatiotn.  Epiphany  comes 
and  they  follow  the  wise  men  with  their  gifts  and 
think  upon  the  larger  appeal  of  Christ's  message. 
Lent  comes  with  its  self-denial,  its  humiliation,  its 
separation  from  worldly  pleasure  for  the  deepen- 
ing of  the  devotional  life.  Good  Friday  comes  and 
they  stand  beside  the  Cross,  witnessing  the  glory 
of  sacrifice,  reflecting  upon  the  reconciliation  ac- 
complished between  God  and  man.  Easter  comes, 
speaking  of  the  triumph  of  good  over  evil,  of  life 
over  death.  Forty  days  later  comes  Ascension  Day 
bearing  its  witness  to  the  widening  influence  of 
Christian  truth  as  it  emerges  from  a  local  into  a 
universal  faith.  Ten  days  later  Whitsunday  com- 
memorates the  outpouring  of  the  Spirit  at  Pente- 
cost. Then  Trinity  Sunday  and  the  Sundays  after 
Trinity  calling  upon  men  to  worship  God  in  the 
fullness  of  His  being !  Then  at  the  end  of  October 


THE  EPISCOPAL  PART  25 

stands  All  Saints,  a  day  of  general  remembrance 
for  all  those  who  having  finished  their  course  in 
faith  do  now  rest  from  their  labors! 

This  noble  outline  of  lessons  and  themes  and 
prayers  helps  to  save  the  minister  and  the  congre- 
gation from  becoming  scrappy,  narrow  and  queer. 
It  prevents  the  preacher  from  playing  all  his  re- 
ligious music  on  one  stop  like  a  bagpipe,  and  en- 
courages him  to  be  a  full  church  organ  with  many 
stops.  It  aids  him  in  declaring  statedly  the  whole 
counsel  of  God  instead  of  dwelling  solely  upon  those 
themes  which  he  personally  enjoys.  And  when  we 
see  the  pettiness  and  the  limitations  of  many  pulpits 
and  many  church  services,  we  wish  some  larger 
scheme  might  be  there  introduced  instead  of  trusting 
everything  to  the  subjective  impulses  of  John  Smith. 
We  feel  like  calling  upon  the  House  of  Bishops  or 
some  caucus  of  presiding  elders  or  some  Synod  or 
General  Assembly  to  outline  a  more  varied  and  ade- 
quate program  for  the  instruction,  the  worhip,  the 
inspiration  of  the  people  who  represent  many  moods, 
many  temperaments,  and  many  forms  of  capability. 

In  the  Prayer  Book  nothing  is  left  to  chance  or 
impulse  or  the  extemporaneous  output  of  some  man, 
who  may  or  may  not  be  possessed  of  judgment  and 
taste.  Here  in  black  and  white  is  printed  what  is  to  be 
said  and  all  that  is  to  be  said,  in  the  baptism  of  a 
child,  in  the  confirmation  of  the  believer,  in  the 
sacrament  of  the  Lord's  Supper.  Here  is  what  is 
to  be  said  at  a  marriage  ceremony,  in  the  visitation 


26  OUR   TOTAL   CHRISTIANITY 

of  the  sick,  at  the  burial  of  the  dead.  Here  is  the 
form  for  the  laying  of  a  corner  stone,  for  the  ordina- 
tion of  a  minister,  for  the  dedication  of  a  church,  or 
for  the  holding  of  family  prayer.  It  is  all  laid  down 
in  systematic  fashion  so  that  everyone  will  know  in 
advance  what  is  to  be  done,  and  said  and  sung. 
"Decently  and  in  order'  -good  taste  and  the  value 
of  system  are  both  strongly  emphasized  in  this 
branch  of  the  church ! 

Because  of  this  emphasis  upon  system,  the  Epis- 
copal Church  does  not  attract  or  develop  so  many 
men  of  striking  personality  as  would  be  the  case 
in  the  Baptist  or  the  Congregational  Church.  It 
does  not  tend  to  the  development  of  strong  preach- 
ers. Phillips  Brooks,  whose  inheritance  and  early 
training  by  the  way  were  Congregational,  became, 
indeed,  one  of  the  greatest  preachers  of  the  Nine- 
teenth Century,  but  he  stood  almost  alone.  There 
was  no  other  preacher  in  that  denomination  to  be 
named  in  the  same  connection  during  that  period. 
The  four  men  who  have  done  so  much  to  make  the 
Episcopal  Church  strong  and  useful  beyond  all 
others  in  the  City  of  New  York,  Bishop  Potter,  Dr. 
Rainsford,  Dr.  Huntington  and  Dr.  Greer,  were  none 
of  them  great  preachers.  They  were  men  of  extra- 
ordinary ability  in  organization  and  administra- 
tion. They  enlisted  the  interest  of  men  of  means, 
they  organized  a  vast  body  of  workers,  they  pointed 
the  way  of  advance  with  the  vision  of  statesmen 
along  lines  of  noble  Christian  usefulness.  All  this 


THE  EPISCOPAL  PART  27 

havs  high  value  and  it  belongs  naturally  to  that 
branch  of  the  Church  of  Christ  which  has  placed  its 
emphasis  upon  administration  more  than  upon 
preaching. 

The  same  idea  of  system  extends  to  their  creed 
statements.  In  the  Baptist  denomination  as  we  saw, 
there  are  no  authoritative  creed  statements — the 
New  Testament  is  their  creed  and  large  liberty  is 
left  for  individual  interpretation.  In  the  Congrega- 
tional denomination  each  church  forms  and  adopts 
its  own  creed.  The  creed  in  the  church  which  I 
serve  was  written  by  the  present  pastor  and  after 
a  few  verbal  amendments  was  adopted  by  the  peo- 
ple,— and  it  stands  today  as  the  expression  of  our 
theological  belief.  But  in  the  Episcopal  Church 
nothing  is  left  to  the  judgment  of  some  local  church 
or  some  individual  minister.  The  Thirty-nine  Ar- 
ticles of  Religion,  the  Apostles  Creed,  the  Nicene 
Creed,  the  Catechism,  where  the  belief  of  each 
Christian  is  set  forth  in  definite  terms,  all  serve  to 
introduce  and  maintain  the  idea  of  system  and 

*/ 

method  in  religious  conviction.  "Let  all  things  be 
done  in  order/  this  church  says — in  worship,  in 
reading  the  scriptures,  in  shaping  those  convictions, 
which  are  vital.  It  has  made  a  distinct  contribu- 
tion in  thus  asserting  and  demonstrating  the  high 
value  of  system. 

In  the  second  place,  it  has  been  distinctive  in  the 
exaltation  of  good  taste.  Let  all  things  be  done 
decently  as  well  as  in  order.  "Worship  the  Lord" 


28  OUR   TOTAL    CHRISTIANITY 


not  only  in  the  integrity,  but '  *  in  the  beauty  of  holi- 
ness!" This  church  has  shown  in  all  the  expres- 
ions  of  its  life  a  high  sense  of  the  artistic  values  in 
spiritual  ministry. 

And  why  not  ?  God  is  not  indifferent  to  beauty- 
He  is  the  God  of  good  taste  as  well  as  of  righteous- 
ness. He  has  filled  the  world  with  beauty,  rain- 
bows and  sunsets,  twinkling  stars  and  dew  drops, 
lovely  flowers  as  well  as  fruits  and  vegetables!  In 
that  section  of  the  world  untouched  by  the  hand  of 
man,  beauty  rather  predominates,  for  there  are 
more  wild  flowers  than  there  are  wild  fruits  or  wild 
vegetables.  He  is  a  lover  of  beauty  and  He  has  placed 
deep  within  the  hearts  of  men  the  capacity  for  ad- 
miration. Worship  the  Lord  therefore  in  the  beauty 
of  holiness ! 

The  Episcopal  Church  beyond  any  other  stands  for 
good  taste  in  religion,  for  the  decorum  of  worship. 
It  shows  this  attitude  in  its  architecture.  The 
Episcopal  churches  here  in  Oakland  are  not  fair 
examples — they  do  not  justly  represent  the  general 
method  of  this  denomination.  When  we  travel 
through  the  country  at  large  we  ordinarily  find 
the  observance  of  good  taste  in  the  archi- 
tecture of  their  places  of  worship.  Even  where  the 
building  is  inexpensive  it  has  a  churchly  look.  And 
the  exterior  as  well  as  the  interior  of  a  church 
should  suggest  the  thought  of  worship.  When  peo- 
ple see  it  they  should  know  at  once  that  it  is  not 
a  place  to  play  billiards  or  to  take  a  Turkish  bath, 


THE  EPISCOPAL  PART  29 

but  a  place  to  worship.  And  the  habit  of  fitting 
up  churches  with  opera  chairs  or  decorating  them 
as  one  might  decorate  a  restaurant  or  a  ladies'  par- 
lor in  a  fine  hotel  has  made  against  the  spirit  of 
reverence  and  aspiration. 

This  good  taste  in  architecture  has  a  profound 
influence.  Episcopalians  do  not  go  to  church  so 
much  to  hear  a  sermon  or  to  be  entertained  by  splen- 
did music  as  to  worship,  to  bow  down,  to  pray  to 
the  Lord,  their  Maker.  Everyone  has  put  into  his 
hand  a  Prayer  Book  indicating  that  he  is  there  not 
merely  to  be  preached  to  but  to  pray  on  his  own 
behalf.  And  when  one  enters  an  Episcopal  church 
any  day  in  the  week,  he  finds  there  an  atmosphere 
of  reverence,  of  aspiration,  of  yearning  after  fellow- 
ship with  the  unseen,  which  has  high  value  in  the 
development  of  noble  religious  life. 

The  habit  of  good  taste  shows  in  their  liturgy. 
These  aids  to  worship  are  not  only  systematic,  cov- 
ering almost  all  conceivable  form  of  human  aspira- 
tion, they  are  also  beautiful.  I  have  used  the  Prayer 
Book  for  twenty  odd  years  and  many  of  its  prayers 
I  know  by  heart.  Let  a  man  open  his  Bible  and  as 
he  begins  to  read  utter  that  little  collect: 

'Blessed  Lord  who  hast  caused  all  holy  scriptures 
to  be  written  for  our  learning,  grant  that  we  may 
in  such  wise  hear  them,  read,  mark,  learn  and  in- 
wardly digest  them,  that  by  patience  and  comfort 
of  thy  Holy  Word  we  may  embrace  and  ever  hold 


30  OUR   TOTAL   CHRISTIANITY 

fast  the  blessed  hope  of  everlasting  life  which  Thou 
hast  given  us  in  our  Savior  Jesus  Christ.' 

Let  him  begin  the  day  with  that  collect,  which 
I  often  use  as  an  invocation  at  the  opening  of  our 
own  church  service : 

"Almighty  God  unto  whom  all  hearts  are  open, 
all  desires  known,  and  from  whom  no  secrets 
are  hid;  cleanse  the  thoughts  of  our  hearts  by  the 
inspiration  of  thy  Holy  Spirit  that  we  may  perfect- 
ly love  Thee  and  worthily  magnify  thy  Holy  Name, 
through  Jesus  Christ  our  Lord/ 

When  he  gathers  his  family  around  him  to  offer 
the  evening  prayer  before  they  lie  down  to  rest, 
let  him  conclude  his  devotions  with  that  beautiful 
prayer  of  Saint  Chrysostom: 

'  Almighty  God  who  hast  given  us  grace  at  this 
time  with  one  accord  to  make  our  common  supplica- 
tion unto  thee  and  dost  promise  that  where  two  or 
three  are  gathered  together  in  thy  name  thou  wilt 
grant  their  requests,  fulfill  now,  O  Lord,  the  desires 
and  petitions  of  thy  servants  as  may  be  most  ex- 
pedient for  them,  granting  us  in  this  world  knowl- 
edge of  thy  truth  aind  in  the  world  to  come  life 
everlasting. ' 

We  find  in  these  and  in  other  sections  of  their 
beautiful  liturgy  the  acme  of  good  taste,  the  perfec- 
tion of  form,  as  well  as  a  rich  vein  of  spiritual  de- 
votion. When  we  hear  some  man  praying  awkwardly, 
ungramatically  perhaps,  or  still  worse  oratorically, 
we  long  for  the  chaste  simplicity  of  the  ritual.  When 


THE  EPISCOPAL  PART  31 

some  man  begins  to  pray  and  then  ceases  to  pray, 
although  he  keeps  on  talking  with  his  eyes  shut 
in  a  kind  of  general  harangue  to  the  Lord  on  the 
good  points  of  some  reform  or  presenting  an  argu- 
ment for  some  pet  conviction  of  his  own,  losing  all 
sense  of  direct,  devout  personal  address  to  God, 
we  wish  that  more  men  had  in  their  hands  some 
competent  guide  for  their  public  petitions. 

I  would  not  advocate  the  surrender  of  what  is 
called  extempore  prayer,  a  minister  voicing  the 
needs  and  aspirations  of  those  whom  he  would  lead 
in  prayer,  with  words  of  his  own  choosing.  Where 
this  is  done  thoughtfully  and  devoutly  I  believe  its 
helpfulness  may  rise  above  that  of  all  fixed  liturgies, 
but  where  it  is  done  in  thoughtless  or  slovenly  or 
oratorical  fashion  it  becomes  an  offense  to  taste  and 
conscience  alike. 

This  contribution  of  good  taste  is  no  light  matter. 
A  refined  and  well-mannered  saint  is  much  to  be 
preferred  to  one  who  lacks  those  qualities.  His 
devotion  to  principle  and  his  strength  of  conviction 
are  all  very  well — we  must  have  these — but  if  you 
are  coming  into  close  contact  with  him.  if  you  are 
to  marry  him,  for  example,  you  would  also  like  to 
have  him  well-bred  and  refined.  The  Episcopal 
Church  undertakes  in  its  whole  method  of  nurture 
and  culture  to  accomplish  just  that.  And  the  sat- 
urative  influence  of  good  architecture,  tasteful  in- 
teriors, good  stained  glass  in  place  of  those  com- 
binations of  color  which  eat  each  other  up,  nobly 


32  OUE   TOTAL   CHRISTIANITY 

framed  liturgies  and  the  spirit  of  decorum  in  wor- 
ship, all  exercise  a  refining  influence  upon  even  the 
rudest  nature  which  in  the  course  of  years  registers 
itself  in  qualities  that  have  value. 

This  is  one  reason,  perhaps,  why  the  Episcopal 
Church  has  more  influence  among  the  actors  and 
artists  of  the  country  than  all  other  denominations 
combined.  The  Episcopalians  have  no  doubt  been 
more  generous  patrons  of  the  theater  and  of  the 
arts  than  have  the  other  groups  of  Christians,  but 
their  mode  of  worship  and  their  general  method 
has  also  been  attractive  to  those  who  are  constantly 
striving  for  the  artistic.  The  Actors'  Church  League 
has  been  an  influence  for  good  in  a  much  needed 
quarter  by  promoting  higher  standards  of  conduct 
upon  the  stage.  Let  all  things  be  done  decently, 
beautifully,  artistically,  as  well  as  righteously  and 
in  order !  Along  the  line  of  good  taste  this  branch 
of  the  Christian  church  has  made  an  important  con- 
tribution to  our  total  Christianity. 

In  the  third  place  the  Episcopal  Church  has  main- 
tained a  high  sense  of  historic  values.  The  word 
Episcopal  comes  from  the  Greek  word,  episcopos,  one 
who  overlooks,  oversees — a  bishop.  The  Episcopal 
Church  is  ruled  by  bishops.  They  attach  great  impor- 
tance to  what  they  call  "the  Historic  Episcopate,' 
believing  that  they  can  trace  their  title  deeds  clear 
back  to  the  time  of  the  Apostles.  Each  minister  is  or- 
dained by  some  bishop,  who  in  turn  was  ordained 
by  another  bishop,  and  he  by  another,  and  so  on 


THE  EPISCOPAL  PART  33 

back  to  the  earliest  periods  of  Christian  history. 
Some  of  these  men  who  are  poets  rather  than  exact 
historians,  like  to  think  that  a  mysterious  grace  has 
come  down  directly  from  Christ  through  his  apostles, 
and  has  been  handed  down  through  this  long  line 
of  bishops  to  the  ministers  of  this  church,  which  is 
governed  by  bishops. 

I  will  not  discuss  this  claim,  for  as  already  indi- 
cated, the  purpose  of  this  series  of  addresses  is  not 
controversial.  I  have  never  been  able  to  find 
much  about  bishops  in  the  New  Testament,  nor  have 
I  been  able  to  see  any  exceptional  usefulness  attach- 
ing to  a  man  merely  because  he  was  ordained  by  a 
bishop.  His  usefulness  as  a  minister  of  Christ  de- 
pends upon  his  physical,  his  mental,  and  his  moral 
make-up,  together  with  the  measure  of  his  consecra- 
tion to  God  and  his  ready  sympathy  with  the  needs 
of  his  fellows.  The  question  of  his  efficiency  turns 
upon  his  possession  of  these  qualities  rather  than 
upon  the  fact  of  his  having  been  ordained  by  a 
bishop  or  conversely  by  a  group  of  elders.  But 
while  there  seems  to  be  very  little  in  the  Bible  about 
bishops,  they  appeared  early  in  the  history  of  the 
church,  as  was  almost  inevitable.  The  world  was 
ruled  by  kings  and  nobles,  and  a  church  governed 
from  above  by  a  Pope  and  by  bishops,  rather  than 
by  the  vote  of  the  congregation  from  beneath,  was 
natural  to  those  periods  which  had  made  little  pro- 
gress in  the  spirit  of  democracy.  The  Episcopal 


34  OUR   TOTAL   CHRISTIANITY 

Church  is  devoted  to  ancient  custom  and  attaches 
considerable  importance  to  these  historic  forms. 

The  Episcopal  Church  of  America  stands  closely 
related  to  the  Anglican  Church.  Its  bishops  attend 
the  Lambeth  Conference  of  Bishops  in  London;  its 
first  bishops  were  consecrated  by  English  bishops. 
The  Anglican  Church  has  historic  relations  with  the 
Roman  Catholic  Church — it  broke  away  from  it  in 
the  time  of  Henry  the  Eighth,  mainly  because  of 
Henry's  quarrel  with  the  Pope  over  the  question  of 
divorcing  his  wife  Catherine,  in  order  to  marry  Anne 
Boleyn.  Henry  resolved  to  throw  off  the  rule  of 
the  papacy,  and  the  Church  of  England  then  became 
independent  of  the  authority  at  Rome.  And  back 
through  these  title  deeds,  seemly  and  unseemly,  this 
church  traces  its  connection  with  ancient  Christian- 
ity and  thus  maintains  this  sense  of  historic  rela- 
tions. 

The  same  sense  of  historic  values  is  to  be  found 
in  the  prayer  book.  Here  are  the  Psalms  of  Israel, 
the  finest  expressions  of  the  devotional  spirit  in  the 
ancient  Jewish  church !  Here  are  the  words  of 
Christ  and  of  His  apostles  in  the  gospel  and  the 
epistle  for  the  day!  Here  are  the  liturgic  forms 
of  the  ancient  church,  the  prayer  of  Saint  Chrys- 
ostom  and  all  the  rest !  Here  are  prayers  and  col- 
lects taken  from  the  Greek  and  Latin  churches  of 
mediaeval  times !  Here  are  choice  bits  of  liturgic 
expression  from  the  early  English  church!  The 


THE  EPISCOPAL  PART  35 

Prayer  Book  is  a  great  cathedral,  reaching  back  to 
the  time  of  Solomon's  Temple  and  to  the  Songs  of 
David,  carding  with  it  the  contributions  and  en- 
largements made  in  all  those  succeeding  periods  of 
religious  development.  And  it  has  become  a  choice 
collection  of  fine  phraseology,  of  deep  piety,  of  fer- 
vency of  spirit,  and  of  exalted  expression.  We  join 
with  ancient  saints,  with  the  churches  throughout 
the  world  and  with  an  innumerable  company  of  fel- 
low believers  in  humbly  and  heartily  voicing  our 
worship  to  Almighty  God. 

Because  of  this  high  sense  of  historic  values  the 
Episcopal  Church  has  been  ready  to  go  all  reasonable 
lengths  in  avoiding  any  division  in  its  ranks.  At  the 
time  of  the  Civil  War  the  Methodist  Church  of  the 
United  States  was  divided  into  two  sections — the 
"Methodist  Episcopal  Church"  and  the  "Methodist 
Episcopal  Church  South"  are  identical  in  polity,  in 
their  articles  of  religion  and  in  the  general  spirit 
and  method  of  their  work,  yet  they  stand  apart  be- 
cause of  the  questions  which  almost  divided  our 
nation  in  1861.  The  Baptist  Church  and  the  Pres- 
byterian Church  were  similarly  divided  over  the 
question  of  slavery.  But  the  Episcopal  Church, 
while  the  meetings  of  the  General  Convention  were 
interrupted  during  the  Civil  War,  was  never  divided. 
The  General  Convention  met  again  in  18S5,  in  Phila- 
delphia, the  City  of  Brotherly  Love,  and  the  southern 
bishops  took  their  places,  and  everything  went  on 
as  before. 


36  OUR   TOTAL   CHRISTIANITY 

This  was  due  in  some  measure  to  the  fact  that 
the  Episcopal  Church  had  not  been  very  outspoken 
in  its  condemnation  of  slavery.  Members  of  that 
communion  were  not  disciplined  for  holding  slaves 
as  they  were  in  the  Methodist,  in  the  Congregational, 
and  in  several  other  churches.  The  Episcopal 
Church  shows  considerable  tolerance  on  many  such 
questions,  temperance,  civic  reform  and  other  cur- 
rent issues.  It  is  generally  understood  that  the  rec- 
tor of  an  important  church  in  San  Francisco  lost 
his  place  recently  because  he  had  been  too  outspoken 
touching  the  recent  graft  prosecution.  And  the 
quiescent  attitude  of  the  Episcopal  Church  toward 
slavery  had  something  to  do  with  the  avoidance  of 
disruption.  This  is  all  true,  but  still  the  deep  sense 
of  their  historic  past,  which  brought  all  sections  of 
this  communion  together  promptly  at  the  close  of 
the  war,  is  a  bulwark  at  all  times  against  the  spirit 
of  schism. 

In  emphasizing  the  value  of  system,  in  promoting 
the  spirit  of  good  taste  in  religious  worship,  and  in 
relating  present  day  Christianity  to  a  noble  and 
an  inspiring  past,  they  have  rendered  splendid 
service.  We  can  never  forget  that  in  the  hour  of 
our  country's  peril,  Abraham  Lincoln  sent  two  men 
to  England  to  influence  public  sentiment  there  in 
favor  of  the  Union  cause.  He  sent  Henry  Ward 
Beecher,  the  leading  orator  of  the  Christian  pulpit 
in  America,  a  Congregationalist,  and  Bishop  Mc- 
Ilvaine  of  Ohio,  representing  the  Episcopal  Church. 


THE  EPISCOPAL  PART  37 

While  Beecher  addressed  and  won  the  masses  in 
Birmingham  and  Manchester,  in  Liverpool  and  Lon- 
don, Bishop  Mcllvaine  went  quietly  among  the  nobil- 
ity and  the  ecclesiastics,  as  his  position  enabled  him 
to  do,  helping  to  produce  that  public  sentiment 
which  turned  the  tide  in  England  in  favor  of  liberty 
and  the  Union.  All  honor  and  gratitude  to  that 
branch  of  the  Christian  church  which,  doing  all 
things  decently  and  in  order,  has  made  its  royal 
contribution  to  the  total  Christianity  of  the  land. 


THE  METHODIST  PART 


I 


N  PRACTICAL  efficiency  few  religious  lead- 
ers since  the  time  of  Paul  have  been 
equal  to  John  Wesley.  He  came  of 
virile  stock — his  grandfather  had  twenty- 
five  children,  and  his  own  mother  gave  birth 
to  nineteen,  John  Wesley  being  the  fifteenth.  He 
was  a  man  of  culture  and  scholarship  as  well  as  a 
flaming  evangelist.  He  was  a  graduate  of  Oxford 
and  a  fellow  of  Lincoln  College.  He  read  the  Latin 
and  Greek  classics  at  sight  and  spoke  French,  Ger- 
man, Italian  and  a  little  Spanish.  He  was  indefati- 
gable in  his  labors — in  his  evangelistic  tours  he  trav- 
elled over  two  hundred  and  fifty  thousand  miles,  far 
enough  to  have  taken  him  around  the  globe  ten 
times.  He  preached  over  forty  thousand  sermons. 
He  arose  at  four  o'clock  in  the  morning  and  was 
busy  all  day,  oftentimes  far  into  the  night.  He  lived 
this  strenuous  life  up  to  his  eighty-fifth  year,  and 
when  he  passed  away  at  eighty-eight  he  had  been 
preaching  with  all  his  accustomed  zeal  until  six  days 
before  his  death.  That  is  the  kind  of  a  Methodist 
Brother  Wesley  was,  and  he  has  bequeathed  a  gen- 
erous portion  of  his  spirit  to  the  largest  Protestant 
denomination  in  this  country. 


THE    METHODIST    PART  39 

He  had  also  his  limitations.  He  shared  in  many 
of  the  superstitions  of  his  time.  He  believed  in 
witchcraft.  He  believed  that  hysteria  was  demoniacal 
possession.  He  was  accustomed  to  decide  questions 
by  opening  the  Bible  at  random  and  taking  the  top 
verse  on  the  page.  He  preached  a  rousing  sermon, 
a  copy  of  which  I  have  in  my  library,  on  * '  The  Cause 
and  Cure  of  Earthquakes/  -if  his  diagnosis  were 
correct  and  his  claims  verifiable  it  would  have  had 
great  value  for  this  community  a  few  years  back. 

He  felt  that  a  large  number  of  the  events  in  his 
life  were  the  direct  results  of  miraculous  interven- 
tion, from  the  stopping  of  a  headache  to  the  cessa- 
tion of  a  rain  storm,  that  he  might  preach.  His 
familiarity  with  the  Bible  was  in  no  sense  critical ; 
he  had  rather  a  popular  or  homiletic  knowledge  of 
it.  But  he  flung  himself  into  the  task  of  inducing 
men  to  forsake  their  sins  and  to  accept  salvation 
through  Jesus  Christ  beyond  any  man  of  his  age. 
He  did  it  with  a  magnificent  success,  in  which  the 
hearts  of  all  Christian  people  rejoice.  And  although 
he  never  severed  his  own  relations  with  the  Church 
of  England,  he  started  Methodism  upon  its  world- 
wide career  of  Christian  usefulness. 

"The  Methodist  Episcopal  Church"  is  the  full 
name  of  this  branch  of  Christ's  church.  The  term 
'Methodist'  was  at  first  a  nickname.  It  was  given 
derisively  to  a  group  of  Oxford  students,  John  and 
Charles  Yfesley  among  the  number,  because  in  their 
determination  to  deepen  their  Christian  life  they 


40  OUR   TOTAL   CHRISTIANITY 

lived  methodically.  They  read  the  scriptures  and 
prayed  and  took  communion,  they  visited  the  sick, 
the  poor,  the  imprisoned,  and  performed  other  acts 
of  Christian  service,  according  to  a  settled  rule  and 
program.  They  were  so  exact  and  conscientious  in 
it  that  their  fellow  students  called  them  "  Metho- 
dists.' They  accepted  the  title,  and  it  has  come  to 
be  the  honorable  designation  of  this  great  branch  of 
the  church. 

The  "Methodist  Episcopal"  Church,  because  it  too 
is  ruled  by  bishops,  as  is  the  Protestant  Episcopal 
Church !  The  Episcopalians  deny  the  validity  of  the 
ordination  of  the  Methodist  bishops  because  the  first 
one  was  not  ordained  by  a.  bishop  who  stood  in  the 
line  of  what  they  like  to  call  "The  Apostolic  Suc- 
cession.' But  the  Roman  Catholics  turn  round  and 
deny  the  validity  of  the  ordination  of  the  Episcopal 
bishops  and  their  clergy,  so  the  honors  are  even. 
The  origin  of  this  "historic  episcopate'  is  so  lost 
in  the  twilight  of  fable  as  not  to  occasion  any  serious 
disturbance  either  in  the  minds  of  those  who  think 
they  have  it,  or  in  the  minds  of  those  who  are  per- 
fectly content  to  be  without  it.  But  whatever  meas- 
ure of  practical  value  or  ancient  sanction  may  be- 
long to  the  office  of  a  bishop,  the  Methodist  Church, 
with  several  others,  possesses  it,  because  it  too  is 
governed  by  bishops. 

The  three  characteristic  contributions  made  by  the 
Methodist  Church  to  our  total  Christianity  would 
seem  to  be  these :  first,  its  splendid  Christian  xeal. 


THE    METHODIST    PART  41 

The  Methodist  Church  shows  an  earnestness  and 
enthusiasm  for  the  conversion  of  men,  for  the  en- 
listment of  believers  in  active  service  and  for  the 
extension  of  the  Kingdom  of  God  in  frontier  and 
needy  communities  beyond  any  other  church.  When 
an  ignorant  woman  heard  John  Wesley  preach  she 
reported  to  her  neighbors,  "He  preaches  as  if  he 
was  just  dyin'  to  have  ye  converted.'  It  was  the 
earnest  desire  of  Wesley  to  reach  the  hearts  of  men 
and  lead  them  to  Christ  which  led  him  to  break  away 
from  the  little  religious  essay  common  to  the  Angli- 
can pulpit  in  his  day,  and  to  preach  without  notes 
in  the  language  of  the  people,  that  he  might  move 
them  by  his  message.  It  is  that  same  quality  of 
earnestness  which  gives  fervor  and  directness  to 
the  preaching  of  the  Methodist  pulpit  to  this  hour. 
The  church  stands  as  a  splendid  fulfillment  of  the 
Apostolic  injunction,  "Preach  the  word;  be  instant 
in  season,  out  of  season;  reprove,  rebuke,  exhort.' 
It  was  their  zeal  which  led  them  to  utilize  lay 
preachers  and  other  untrained  men  so  largely  in 
their  early  history.  Wesley  and  his  followers 
licensed  local  preachers  and  sent  them  to  needy 
places,  where  it  was  impossible  to  furnish  theologic- 
ally trained  clergymen.  And  their  labors  have  been 
abundantly  blessed.  The  old  circuit  rider  who  went 
from  place  to  place,  preaching  in  school  houses,  in 
the  homes  of  the  people,  in  tents  or  out  of  doors, 
wherever  a  congregation  could  be  gathered,  often 
had  little  theological  training  or  literary  equipment. 


42  OUK   TOTAL   CHRISTIANITY 

He  carried  a  Bible,  a  hymn  book,  a  copy  of  the  Meth- 
odist discipline,  and  perhaps  a  volume  of  Wesley's 
notes  in  his  saddle  bags,  placing  his  main  reliance 
upon  the  sincerity  and  fervor  of  his  own  heart  as 
he  called  upon  men  to  forsake  their  evil  ways  and 
follow  Christ.  It  was  a  time  when  books  were  not 
common  as  they  are  now,  when  newspapers  and 
magazines  were  not  in  general  circulation,  and  these 
unschooled  men  found  ready  acceptance  for  their 
message,  and  they  rendered  a  noble  service  in  laying 
the  foundations  of  the  Kingdom  of  God  out  on  the 
frontiers  and  in  thousands  of  neglected  communities. 
When  I  speak  of  "zeal' '  I  do  not  mean  mere  noise, 
although  many  thorough-going  Methodists  have 
learned  to  observe  the  injunction  of  the  psalmist- 
"Make  a  joyful  noise  unto  the  Lord.'  I  do  not 
mean  mere  excitement  and  hysteria,  which  are  often- 
times symptoms  of  disease  rather  than  of  health.  I 
mean  that  measure  of  spiritual  warmth  and  desire 
which  shows  itself  effective  in  moving  and  chang- 
ing the  hearts  of  men.  This  genuine  zeal  has  borne 
solid  and  verifiable  fruit.  It  was  one  of  England's 
reliable  historians  who  said  that  in  his  judgment 
John  Wesley  and  the  Methodist  revival  did  more 
to  save  England  from  the  horrors  and  excesses  of 
the  French  revolution,  which  worked  destruction 
as  well  as  renewal  among  their  neighbors  across  the 
Channel,  than  any  other  single  influence  which  could 
be  named.  And  in  our  own  country  it  is  universally 
believed  that  the  work  of  those  circuit  riders  and 


THE    METHODIST    PART  43 

pioneer  preachers,  pushing  out  into  all  parts  of  our 
land  and  establishing  there  the  institutions  of  re- 
ligion, had  much  to  do  with  the  development  of 
that  moral  fiber  which  made  our  country  equal  to 
the  exacting  demands  upon  it  in  the  struggles  of 
the  Civil  War.  Lincoln  said  one  day  to  a  group 
of  Methodist  preachers  who  called  at  the  White 
House  to  pay  their  respects  to  the  head  of  the  na- 
tion, "The  Methodist  Church  has  sent  more  prayers 
to  heaven  for  the  Union  cause  and  more  men  into 
the  field  than  any  other  branch  of  Christ's  church.' 
It  has  been  a  "zeal  according  to  knowledge'  -a 
knowledge  of  the  human  heart  and  its  needs — and 
it  has  borne  splendid  moral  fruitage  throughout  the 
English  speaking  world. 

This  quality  of  zeal  has  tended  to  elicit  the  preach- 
ing ability  in  the  constituency  of  this  body.  The 
Methodist  Church  has  developed  a  great  number  of 
effective  preachers.  Some  of  these  have  been 
notable  in  the  history  of  the  country, — Stephen 
Olin  and  John  P.  Durbin,  Bishop  Matthew  Simpson 
and  Bishop  Randolph  S.  Foster,  Bishop  Thoburn  of 
India  and  Bishop  William  Taylor,  a  street  preacher 
in  San  Francisco  in  '49  and  afterward  conspicuous 
for  his  missionary  labors  in  South  America,  in  India 
and  last  of  all  in  Africa.  And  of  men  not  sufficiently 
famous  to  be  noticed  in  history,  this  church  has  de- 
veloped a  great  number  of  useful  preachers,  who, 
perhaps  lacking  in  the  finest  literary  finish  and  in 
the  fuller  measure  of  scholarship,  have  shown,  never- 


44  OUR    TOTAL   CHRISTIANITY 

theless,  by  their  practical  efficiency  in  interpreting 
the  scripture  and  in  bringing  help  to  men,  the  power 
of  direct  and  influential  address. 

The  Methodist  Church  has  trusted  to  the  zeal  of 
its  clergy,  and  to  the  warmth  and  reality  of  its  own 
spiritual  life,  for  the  maintenance  of  evangelical 
faith  rather  than  to  any  elaborate  creed  statements 
or  standards  of  belief.  John  Wesley  abridged  the 
Thirty-nine  Articles  of  Religion  of  the  English 
Church  into  twentj'-five  and  these  briefer  articles 
have  constitiited  the  creed  statement  of  the  Method- 
ists since  the  year  1784.  They  have  never  been 
changed  in  all  the  one  hundred  and  twenty-six  years 
and  by  vote  of  the  General  Conference  in  1832  it 
was  made  unconstitutional  to  thenceforth  propose 
any  change  in  the  Articles  of  Religion.  The  fact 
that  this  creed  statement  contains  only  simple  and 
general  references  to  the  fundamental  articles  of 
religious  faith  has  saved  it  from  being  an  embarrass- 
ment to  this  body  of  Christians. 

The  Methodist  Church  has  been  troubled  very 
little  by  heresy  trials.  The  earnestness  and  zeal  of 
the  clergy  leave  them  little  time  for  that  purely 
speculative  discussion  which  often  engenders  heresy 
and  strife.  And  it  is  one  of  the  significant  facts  of 
modern  church  history,  that  while  their  standards 
are  broad  and  simple  the  Methodist  Church  through- 
out the  world  is  in  substantial  agreement  with  it- 
self in  the  substance  of  its  message,  and  it  has  re- 


THE    METHODIST    PART  45 

mained,  through  all  these  one  hundred  and  twenty- 
six  years,  profoundly  evangelical  in  tone. 

The  second  contribution  lies  in  its  large  utiliza- 
tion of  the  emotional  nature  in  the  formation  of 
Christian  character.  "With  the  heart  man  be- 
lieveth  unto  righteousness/  more  than  with  the 
head !  The  main  appeal,  therefore,  should  be  to  the 
feelings  because  people,  taking  them  by  and  large, 
do  what  they  feel  like  doing.  They  may  not  have 
reasoned  it  all  out;  they  may  not  make  it  a  matter 
of  strict  conscience,  but  they  do  certain  things  or 
fail  to  do  them  because  they  feel  that  way.  Not  a 
closely  reasoned  argument  on  the  appropriateness 
and  desirability  of  Christian  life,  but  the  direct 
appeal  to  the  affections  becomes  the  most  useful 
instrument  in  the  hands  of  men  who  would  lead 
others  to  Christ. 

We  find  this  emphasis  on  the  emotional  life  in  the 
general  quality  of  their  preaching.  We  find  it  in  the 
greater  prominence  given  to  feeling  in  the  hymns 
of  Charles  Wesley  and  other  Methodist  hymn 
writers.  We  find  it  in  the  heartiness  of  their  con- 
gregational singing,  which  is  better  than  that  of  any 
other  church  in  America — the  people  who  sing  are 
the  people  who  feel.  We  find  it  in  the  hearty 
responses  in  the  shape  of  round  "Amens'  which 
sometimes  come  back  from  the  pew  when  the 
speaker  has  made  a  telling  point. 

We  find  it  also  in  their  emphasis  upon  the  doc- 
trine, which  they  call  "the  witness  of  the  Spirit.' 


46  OUR   TOTAL,   CHRISTIANITY 

How  is  a  man  to  know  that  he  is  saved,  that  he  has 
found  acceptance  with  God?  "The  church  will  tell 
him"  one  group  of  Christian  people  say, — let 
him  accept  the  testimony  of  the  church  on  that  point 
as  given  from  the  lips  of  its  priest.'  "The  Bible 
will  tell  him,"  another  group  replies — "let  him 
stand  on  the  promises  of  the  Lord  as  made  in  His 
own  Holy  Word.'  "Let  his  own  reason  tell  him,' 
others  answer; — "if  he  has  met  the  conditions  of 
salvation,  then  as  a  logical  result  he  has  found  ac- 
ceptance with  God.'  No  one  of  these  replies  would 
be  satisfactory  to  the  followers  of  "Wesley.  "He 
need  not  ask  the  church,  or  the  Bible,  or  his  reason, ' 
the  Methodist  asserts.  "God  will  tell  him  in  his  own 
heart.  He  will  feel  it.  The  Spirit  Himself  beareth 
witness  with  our  spirits  that  we  are  the  children  of 
God.'  And  the  joy  of  being  saved  and  of  knowing 
it  and  of  being  able  to  tell  it  has  been  a  leading 
note  in  the  religious  life  of  this  branch  of  the  church. 
It  was  a  beautiful  and  a  blessed  message  to  bring 
to  that  despondent  age  to  which  Wesley  preached.  It 
was  a  time  when  the  full  rigor  of  Calvinism  was  in 
the  saddle  and  it  rode  the  patient  people  to  their 
hurt.  It  was  believed  that  God  by  His  immutable 
decrees  had  from  all  eternity  determined  who  should 
be  saved  and  who  should  be  lost,  and  that  nothing 
that  man  could  do  would  change  those  decrees. 
This  was  a  comforting  doctrine  to  those  who  by  their 
own  spiritual  conceit  perhaps  had  concluded  that 
they  belonged  to  "the  elect,"  but  as  the  great  major- 


THE    METHODIST    PART  47 


ity  of  people  were  either  too  ignorant  or  too  modest 
to  believe  that  about  themselves  it  was  also  a  de- 
pressing doctrine.  They  had  an  old  hymn  they  used 
to  sing : 

' '  Tis  a  point  I  long  to  know 

Oft  it  causes  anxious  thought, 

Do  I  love  the  Lord  or  no 

Am  I  His  or  am  I  not.' 

It  all  depended  upon  those  eternal  decrees  which 
had  been  established  from  all  eternity. 

It  meant  everything  then  to  have  men  go  about 
asserting  that,  "The  elect  are  whosoever  will  and 
the  non-elect  are  whosoever  won't.'  They  had  not 
reasoned  it  all  out.  They  did  not  undertake  to 
combat  on  philosophical  grounds  \vhat  the  theo- 
logians called  "predestination,'  what  the  man  on 
the  street  calls  "fate,'  what  the  scientist  calls 
"determinism.'  But  out  of  the  fullness  of  their 
own  experience  of  God's  loving  mercy,  of  Christ's 
offered  redemption  and  of  the  Spirit's  witness  to 
their  acceptance  in  their  own  hearts,  they  went 
about  preaching  the  good  news  of  salvation.  "The 
Spirit  and  the  Bride  say,  Come.  Let  him  that  is 
athirst,  Come.  And  whosoever  will,  let  him  take 
the  water  of  life  freely.'  This  joyous  message 
touched,  and  moved,  and  renewed  the  hearts  of  the 
people, — the  Methodist  Church  grew  by  leaps  and 
bounds.  The  joy  of  their  songs,  their  testimonies, 
their  inner  satisfactions  became  a  mighty  influence 
in  extending  that  branch  of  the  church.  "We  have 


48  OUK   TOTAL   CHRISTIANITY 

not  received  the  spirit  of  bondage  again  to  fear,' 
they  cried,  "we  have  received  the  spirit  of  adoption, 
whereby  we  cry,  Abba,  Father.' 

It  would  be  easy  to  carry  the  emotional  element 
in  religion  to  excess  where  it  might  result  in  a  use- 
less and  unseemly  form  of  self-indulgence.  If  we 
fix  the  attention  solely  upon  the  raptures  and  ferv- 
ors of  people  it  is  not  always  easy  to  distinguish 
sham  from  reality.  Jumping  up  and  down  or  shout- 
ing so  that  one  can  be  heard  in  the  next  block  has 
no  particular  value  even  where  it  is  done  in  a  relig- 
ious meeting,  unless  it  leads  to  something.  The  final 
test  of  anything,  feeling,  ritual  or  belief,  is  life,  con- 
duct, service.  The  Methodist  leaders  have  shown 
great  wisdom  in  undertaking  to  speedily  harness 
these  floods  of  emotion  to  some  form  of  practical  ef- 
fort. When  this  is  done  the  fervor  may  have  great 
significance.  The  heart  ha-s  its  rights  as  well  as  the 
the  head.  And  in  that  section  of  human  interest 
where  the  two  great  commandments  are  not  "Thou 
shalt  know"  or  "Thou  shall  do,"  but  "Thou  shalt 
love  the  Lord  thy  God  with  all  thy  heart,  and  thou 
shalt  love  thy  neighbor  as  thyself,'  this  emphasis 
upon  the  emotional  life  has  shown  good  statesman- 
ship. 

The  third  contribution  lies  in  the  value  of  their 
organization.  I  believe  the  polity  of  the  Methodist 
Church  is  the  best  in  the  world,  not  even  excepting 
the  Roman  Catholic.  The  Catholic  Church  makes 
entirely  inadequate  provision  for  the  growing  spirit 


THE    METHODIST    PART  49 

of  democracy,  which  it  is  compelled  to  reckon  with 
in  this  country,  and  must  reckon  with  increasingly 
in  all  countries.  The  Methodists  combine  monarch- 
ical authority,  which  is  entrusted  to  its  general 
superintendents  or  bishops,  with  the  spirit  of  democ- 
racy in  making  large  provision  for  the  influence  and 
activity  of  the  laity.  It  is  therefore  able  to  offer 
what  seems  to  me  the  most  effective  form  of  church 
polity  in  the  field. 

Take  this  single  instance  of  it — the  organization 
of  their  ministers  into  conferences  under  what  is 
known  as  the  ''itinerant  system.'  Every  preacher 
ready  for  service  belongs  to  some  annual  conference 
which  covers  a  certain  geographical  area.  Here  in 
California  we  have  two  conferences — the  California 
and  the  Southern  California — covering  the  entire 
state.  Once  a  year  all  these  preachers  meet  togther 
in  conference  with  the  Presiding  Bishop,  and  the 
Bishop  appoints  them  to  the  places  where  they  shall 
preach  for  the  next  year.  He  has  absolute  power 
to  do  this.  He  could,  if  he  were  a  man  without 
sense  or  conscience,  entirely  override  the  wishes  of 
any  preacher  or  any  congregation.  He  may  receive 
information  and  advice  from  whatever  source  may 
offer,  but  the  final  decision  rests  solely  with  him. 
In  early  days  pastorates  were  limited  to  one  year; 
then  the  time  limit  was  extended  to  two  years,  then 
to  three,  then  to  five.  Now  it  has  been  removed 
altogether,  so  that  a  minister  may  be  reappointed 
to  the  same  church  indefinitely,  but  always  for  a 


50  OUK    TOTAL   CHRISTIANITY 

period  of  oue  year.  No  Methodist  minister  is  ever 
invited  or  appointed  to  the  pastorate  of  any  church 
indefinitely,  as  would  be  the  case  in  a  Presbyterian 
or  a  Congregational  church. 

Such  a  system  does  sometimes  work  disappoint- 
ment and  hardship.  A  church  may  not  always  secure 
the  pastor  it  wants,  or  the  pastor  who  would  be  best 
for  it.  The  minister  may  not  always  go  where  he 
would  like  to  go  and  could  go.  The  bishops  are  not 
omniscient,  but  they  desire  the  peace  and  prosperity 
of  the  churches,  and  they  desire  the  highest  use- 
fulness  of  the  ministers.  They  listen  to  the  repre- 
sentations of  the  laymen  who  represent  the  various 
congregations,  they  listen  to  the  wishes  of  the 
preachers  themselves,  and  then  make  such  appoint- 
ments as  seem  wise  and  right.  And  as  a  matter  of 
fact  the  system  works  well.  Every  Methodist  church 
in  the  United  States  has  a  pastor  all  the  time,  and 
every  Methodist  pastor  has  a  church  all  the  time. 
There  are  no  discouraging  and  disintegrating  per- 
iods when  the  church  is  without  a  minister. 

The  changes  are  also  made  on  tjie  whole  with  very 
little  friction.  The  task  of  getting  rid  of  a  minister 
who  has  come  to  be  unacceptable  to  the  majority  of 
his  cpngregatiofn  is  in  other  communions  oftentimes 
an  unhappy  experience  for  him  and  for  them.  It 
r  may  be  as  painful  as  having  all  one's  teeth  pulled. 
But  under  the  Methodist  polity  when  the  Annual 
Conference  comes  the  change  can  be  made  quietly, 
without  splitting  the  church  into  factions,  and  with- 


THE    METHODIST    PART  51 

out  painful  embarrassment  to  the  minister.  When 
the  Sunday  after  conference  arrives,  every  church 
has  its  own  pastor  and  every  pastor  is  preaching  in 
his  own  church.  It  is  a  system  which  works/  and 
that  after  all  is  the  best  test  of  any  method. 

The  limiting  of  the  pastorate  to  short  periods  in 
the  early  history  of  the  Methodist  Church  enabled 
it  to  use  large  numbers  of  untrained  men,  and  men 
of  moderate  resources,  to  the  glory  of  God  and  for 
the  good  of  society.  There  is  no  reason  in  the  nature 
of  the  case  why  a  man's  ministry  in  any  church 
should  be  of  a  certain  length,  five  years,  or  ten 
years,  or  twenty  years — it  all  depends  on  the  length 
of  the  man.  There  are  men  who  are  preached  out  at. 
the  end  of  a  year  or  two,  and  both  preacher  and  con- 
gregation need  what  the  farmers  call  a  "rotation 
of  crops.'  It  is  an  exacting  demand  which  the,,pas- 
torate  of  ten  or  twenty  years  makes  upon  a  man, 
standing  as  he  does  in  the  same  place  twice  a  week 
to  speak  to  many  of  the  same  people,  touching  the 
truths  of  religion.  The  wise  men  of  the  Methodist 
Church  knew  that  in  the  rapid  growth  of  their  work 
and  in  the  absence  *of  a  srfficient  number  of 
thoroughly  trained  men,  they  would  be  able  to  use 
ministers  of  fewer  resources  with  splendid  effect 
under  their  itinerant  system. 

They  have  shown  a  genius  for  organization.  Not 
content  with  building  up  strong  churches  they  have 
been  fertile  in  the  promotion  of  more  extended  ef- 
forts. The  Chautauqua  movement  is  non-sectarian, 


52  OUR   TOTAL   CHRISTIANITY 

but  Bishop  Vincent  of  the  Methodist  Church  was 
the  founder  of  it,  and  that  church  has  furnished  its 
largest  support.  The  Freedmen's  Aid  Society  for  the 
education  and  evangelization  of  the  released  slaves 
has  rendered  a  magnificent  service  to  the  nation. 
The  Epworth  League,  which  ranks  almost  with  the 
Christian  Endeavor  Society,  as  a  movement  for  the 
training  of  young  people  in  Christian  life  and  serv- 
ice, is  exclusively  a  Methodist  body.  The  Order 
of  Deaconesses  and  the  Methodist  Hospitals  in  most 
of  the  large  cities  have  given  evidence  of  the  same 
spirit  of  practical  efficiency  in  this  branch  of  the 
church. 

By  their  splendid  enthusiasm  and  zeal,  by  their  wise 
and  wide  use  of  the  emotional  element  in  human 
nature,  and  by  their  practical,  efficient  organization 
they  have  made  large  and  rapid  growth  in  member- 
ship until  the  Methodist  Church  is  the  largest  Protes- 
tant denomination  in  our  country.  It  was  John 
Wesley  who  said,  ''The  world  is  my  parish.'  He 
meant  it  intensively,  as  well  as  extensively,  desir- 
ing that  the  religion  of  Christ  should  ally  itself 
with  every  human  interest,  as  well  as  spread  into  all 
lands.  And  that  body  of  Christians  who  revere  him 
as  the  founder  of  their  branch  of  the  church  has 
moved  ahead  in  splendid  fulfillment  of  that  great 
hope. 


THE  PRESBYTERIAN  PART 


I 


T  IS  scarcely  too  much  to  say  that  the 
Presbyterian  Church  represents  more 
money,  more  brains  and  more  piety  than 
any  other  one  church  in  America.  It  has  no 
more  money  per  capita  perhaps  than  the  Episcopal 
Church,  but  it  is  a  large  church,  numbering  almost 
two  millions  of  members,  while  the  Episcopal 
Church  is  one  of  the  smaller  churches.  It  has  no 
more  brains  per  capita  than  have  the  Congrega- 
tionalists,  but  the  whole  Congregational  body  only 
numbers  some  seven  hundred  thousand  communi- 
cants. It  ranks  well  with  any  denomination  in  its 
sense  of  duty,  its  attachment  to  high  ideals,  its 
adherence  to  principle  and  its  consciousness  of  the 
spiritual  world.  When  we  come  to  add  up  its  material, 
its  intellectual  and  its  spiritual  resources,  it  may 
be  said  to  make  a  larger  showing  than  any  other 
branch  of  the  Christian  church  in  this  country. 
The  word  Presbyterian  comes  from  the  Greek 

word  presbuteros,  which  means  "an  elder.'  It  is 
a  church  ruled  by  elders.  The  ordained  ministers 

are  "teaching  elders,'  and  in  each  congregation 
there  are  laymen  elected  as  "ruling  elders.'  The 
pastor  with  the  elders  and  the  deacons  compose 
the  Session,  which  is  the  ruling  body  of  the  local 


54  OUK    TOTAL  CHRISTIANITY 

church.  A  number  of  churches  conveniently 
located  are  organized  into  a  Presbytery,  which  is 
made  up  of  all  teaching  elders  resident  within  its 
borders  and  a  ruling  elder  from  each  congregation. 
These  Presbyteries  are  organized  into  Synods,  which 
sometimes  comprise  entire  states  and  above  these 
Synods  stands  the  General  Assembly,  made  up  of 
ministers  and  ruling  elders  in  equal  proportions, 
representing  all  the  Presbyteries  of  the  church.  The 
Presbyterian  Church  stands  closely  related  to  the 
Reformed  Churches  of  Germany,  of  Holland  and  of 
PYance,  both  in  doctrine  and  polity.  It  holds  a 
position  midway  between  the  monarchical  form  of 
church  government  by  bishops,  and  the  pure  de- 
mocracy of  the  congregational  polity. 

The  four  distinctive  contributions  made  by  this 
branch  of  the  church  to  our  total  Christianity  seem 
to  be  these* — first,  its  habit  of  conservatism.  It  is 
a  cautious,  deliberate  church.  It  does  not  readily 
lose  its  head.  It  is  never  easy  to  stampede  a  com- 
pany of  Presbyterians.  They  are  ready  in  their 
own  good  time  to  "prove  all  things,'  but  they  are 
strongly  bent  on  "holding  fast  that  which  is  good.' 

Its  three  main  standards  of  doctrine  are  the 
Shorter  Catechism,  the  Larger  Catechism  and  tfhe 
Westminster  Confession  of  Faith.  This  remarkable 
Confession  was  wrought  out  by  an  assembly  con- 
vened in  England's  most  famous  place  of  worship, 
Westminster  Abbey,  in  1643.  This  assembly  was 
made  up  of  one  hundred  and  twenty-one  Doctors 


THE    PKESBYTEBIAN    PART  55 

of  Divinity,  eleven  Lords,  twenty  Commoners  and 
seven  commissioners  from  Scotland.  It  continued 
in  session  for  five  years  and  a  half  and  held  some 
twelve  thousand  meetings.  They  met  every  day 
in  the  week  except  Saturday,  and  sat  from  nine 
o'clock  until  two.  Each  session  was  opened  and 
closed  with  prayer  and  one  day  in  each  month  was 
set  apart  for  prayer,  when  they  came  together  and 
continued  for  four  hours  in  continuous  supplication. 
The  Westminster  Confession  thus  issued  from  an 
atmosphere  of  earnest  devotion. 

It  wras  in  the  time  of  Bacon  and  Shakespeare. 
The  King  James  version  of  the  Bible  had  just  been 
published.  It  was  a  period  when  the  English  lan- 
guage was  at  its  best.  It  was  also  a  time  when 
men  were  not  satisfied  with  easy-going  standards 
or  superficial  statements.  The  age  demanded  a 
creed  which  would  be  an  impregnable  statement 
of  religious  truth,  to  serve  as  a  bulwark  against 
the  errors  of  Romanism,  as  a  basis  of  ecclesiastical 
fellowship  and  as  an  effective  instrument  for  the 
religious  instruction  of  the  people  of  God  and  their 
children.  The  Westminster  Confession  came  forth 
in  response  to  that  demand. 

It  is  no  milk-and-water  affair.  It  undertakes  to 
be  the  most  logical,  fundamental  and  explicit  setting 
forth  of  man's  relations  to  his  Maker  anywhere 
contained  in  the  creeds  of  Christendom.  And  when 
you  read  it  with  an  open  mind  you  realize  at  once 
that  it  is  designed  to  build  up  a  massive  and  mas- 


56  OUR    TOTAL    CHRISTIANITY 

culine  type  of  piety  in  the  lives  of  those  who  give 
it  their  adherence. 

It  is  the  great  digest  of  Calvinism,  the  system 
of  that  man  of  iron,  who  stood  forth  as  a  theo- 
logian and  a  reformer  in  Geneva.  It  plants  itself 
firmly  on  the  five  points  of  Calvinism.  Human 
depravity — man  is  hopelessly  corrupt  and  has  no 
power  in  himself  for  moral  recovery.  Uncondi- 
tional election — God  from  all  eternity  has,  by  His 
immutable  decrees,  determined  that  certain  men 
should  be  saved.  A  limited  atonement — Christ  died 
for  the  elect ;  He  did  not  die  for  the  nun-elect,  for 
that  would  have  been  shedding  His  blood  in  vain. 
Irresistible  grace — in  order  to  make  God's  decrees 
of  election  effective  there  must  proceed  from  Him 
a  moral  influnce  which  cannot  be  successfully  op- 
posed. The  final  perserverance  of  the  saints- 
'once  in  grace,  always  in  grace'  -for  if  a  man 
once  renewed  and  numbered  among  the  elect  should 
fall  away  into  sin  it  would  negative  one  of  those 
eternal  decrees.  And  upon  this  theological  state- 
ment, heading  up  in  the  Divine  sovereignly  and 
dependent  for  its  action  not  upon  the  moral  choice 
of  the  individual,  but  upon  the  assertion  of  an  In- 
finite Will,  the  Presbyterian  Churches  of  England 
and  America  take  their  stand. 

It  would  be  easy  to  poke  fun  at  or  to  pour  scorn 
upon  some  of  the  statements  of  belief  included  in 
such  thoroughgoing  Calvinism — popular  novelists, 
sensational  preachers  and  the  secular  press  have 


THE    PRESBYTERIAN    PART  57 

all  taken  their  turn  at  this  interesting  diversion. 
But  by  their  fruits  we  must  judge  statements  of 
belief  and  these  great  convictions  have  nerved  men 
and  women  to  live  nobly  and  to  die  heroically  be- 
yond those  of  any  other  single  religious  creed  which 
can  be  named.  When  spiritual  tyrrany  showed  its 
ugly  head  in  England  and  in  Scotland,  in  Ger- 
many, in  France  and  in  Switzerland,  men  and 
women  of  heroic  build,  fed  upon  the  great  convic- 
tions of  Calvin,  stood  up  to  resist  and  they  present  a 
magnificient  array  of  martyrs,  who  sealed  their 
testimony  in  their  own  blood. 

It  was  John  Morley,  a  careful  and  critical  his- 
torian, an  outspoken  agnostic  in  his  own  religious 
attitude,  who  said:  ''Calvinism  has  inspired  incom- 
parable energy,  concentration,  resolution.  It  has 
exalted  its  votaries  to  a  pitch  of  heroic  moral 
strength  that  has  never  been  surpassed.  They  have 
exhibited  an  active  courage,  a  resolute  endurance, 
a  cheerful  self-restraint,  and  an  exulting  self-sacri- 
fice which  men  count  among  the  highest  glories  of 
the  human  conscience.'  It  is  impossible  for  any 
man  to  dismiss  such  a  system  with  a  sneer. 

It  was  John  Fiske,  the  philosophical  historian, 
standing  himself  on  the  borders  between  Unitarian- 
ism  and  agnosticism,  who  paid  this  tribute  to  the 
sturdy  influence  of  Calvinism  upon  the  cause  of 
human  freedom: 

"It  would  be  hard  to  overrate  the  debt  which 
mankind  owes  to  Calvin.  The  spiritual  father  of 


58  OUK    TOTAL    CHRISTIANITY 

Coligny,  of  William  the  Silent,  and  of  Cromwell 
must  occupy  a  foremost  rank  among  the  champions 
of  modern  democracy.  Perhaps  not  one  of  the 
mediaeval  popes  was  more  despotic  in  temper  than 
Calvin;  but  it  is  not  the  less  true  that  the  promul- 
gation of  his  theology  was  one  of  the  longest  steps 
that  mankind  has  taken  toward  personal  freedom. 
Calvinism  left  the  individual  man  alone  in  the  pres- 
ence of  his  God.  His  salvation  could  not  be  wrought 
by  priestly  ritual,  but  only  by  the  grace  of  God 
abounding  in  his  own  soul ;  and  wretched  creature 
that  he  felt  himself  to  be,  through  the  intense  moral 
awakening  of  which  this  stern  theolog}^  was  in  part 
the  expression,  his  soul  was  nevertheless  of  infinite 
value,  and  the  possession  of  it  was  the  subject  of 
an  everlasting  struggle  between  the  powers  of 
heaven  and  the  powers  of  hell.' 

'In  the  presence  of  the  awful  responsibility  of 
life,  all  distinctions  of  rank  and  fortune  vanished ; 
prince  and  pauper  were  alike  the  helpless  creatures 
of  Jehovah  and  suppliants  for  his  grace.  Calvin 
did  not  originate  these  doctrines  ;  in  announcing  them 
he  was  but  setting  forth,  as  he  said,  the  Institutes 
of  the  Christian  religion;  but  in  emphasizing  this 
aspect  of  Christianity,  in  engraving  it  upon  men's 
minds  with  that  keen-edged  logic  which  he  used 
with  such  unrivalled  skill,  Calvin  made  them  feel, 
as  it  had  perhaps  never  been  felt  before,  the  dig- 
nity and  importance  of  the  individual  human  soul. 
It  was  a  religion  fit  to  inspire  men  who  were  to  be 


THE    PRESBYTERIAN    PART  59 

called  upon  to  fight  for  freedom,  whether  in  the 
marshes  of  the  Netherlands,  or  on  the  moors  of  Scot- 
land." 

Now  the  Presbyterian  Church  has  taken  that  theo- 
logical system  known  as  Calvinism  and  has  held 
on  to  it  with  a  tenacity  which  amazed  the  Nine- 
teenth Century,  and  will  amaze  this  light-hearted 
Twentieth  Century  accustomed  as  it  is  to  say  that 
it  does  not  care  what  a  man  believes,  if  he  is  only 
sincere.  The  Presbyterian  Church  cares.  It  is  a  doc- 
trinal church,  doctrinal  in  its  preaching,  doctrinal 
in  the  tone  of  its  periodicals,  doctrinal  in  requiring 
theological  soundness  in  its  office  bearers.  From 
candidates  for  admission  to  the  membership  of  the 
church  it  requires  nothing  but  repentance  for  sin, 
faith  in  the  Lord  Jesus  Christ  and  the  consecration 
of  the  life  to  God — it  is  exceedingly  simple  and 
broad  as  to  its  doctrinal  requirement.  But  from 
its  ministers  and  ruling  elders  it  has  required  until 
recently  assent  to  the  entire  Westminster  Confession, 
and  even  now  its  demands  are  more  rigorous  than 
those  of  any  other  Protestant  denomination. 

It  stands  ready  to  accept  whatever  odium  or 
hardship  may  come  with  this  conservative  habit  of 
mind.  Men  may  declaim  against  the  positions  of 
Calvinism  as  being  incredible  to  reason,  as  being 
unscriptural,  as  dishonoring  to  God,  as  intolerable 
to  men,  but  until  it  believes  that,  from  the  teachings 
of  the  apostles  and  of  Christ  himself,  it  has  been  dis- 


60  OUR    TOTAL    CHRISTIANITY 

lodged  from  these  positions  the  Presbyterian  Church 
does  not  propose  to  change  front. 

The  most  famous  heresy  trials  of  the  Nineteenth 
Century  have  naturally  occurred  in  the  Presbyterian 
Church.  Robertson  Smith  of  the  Universitv  of 

•i 

Aberdeen  in  Scotland,  one  of  the  most  gifted 
students  of  the  Old  Testament  in  modern  times,  was 
deposed  from  his  chair  for  heresy.  David  Swing 
of  Chicago,  one  of  the  most  popular  preachers  in 
that  busy  city,  was  compelled  to  leave  the  Presby- 
terian Church  because  of  heresy.  Professor  Charles 
A.  Briggs  of  Union  Seminary  was  expelled  from  the 
Presbyterian  Church  for  teachings  which  seemed  to 
conflict  with  the  Westminster  Confession.  Pro- 
fessor Hemy  Preserved  Smith  of  Lane  Seminary, 
Cincinnati,  was  similarly  deposed,  and  the  agita- 
tion regarding  Professor  A.  C.  McGiffert,  the  lead- 
ing church  historian  in  this  country,  made  it  seem 
appropriate  to  him  to  voluntarily  withdraw  from 
the  Presbyterian  denomination. 

Now  where  conservatism  does  not  spring  from 
any  narrow-minded  bigotry  or  from  sheer  pig-head- 
edness,  we  honor  it.  Personally  I  could  no  more 
hold  up  my  hand  and  swear  that  I  believed  all  the 
theological  statements  in  the  Westminster  Confes- 
sion than  I  could  swear  that  I  believed  two  and  two 
might  make  five.  But  here  is  a  large,  thoughful, 
conscientious  body  of  Christian  men  and  women, 
who  do  believe  that  these  statements  are  true  and 
because  of  their  loyalty  to  conviction  they  are  pre- 


THE    PKESBYTEKIAN    PAKT  61 

pared  to  accept  whatever  hardship  or  odium  may 
attach  to  insistence  upon  these  standards. 

We  need  the  conservatives  no  less  than  the  liberals 
and  the  radicals  in  the  everlasting  struggle  for 
human  progress.  We  need  those  men  who.  by  their 
very  habit  of  mind,  will  be  sure  not  to  abandon 
anything  that  has  value.  We  need  those,  who  rever- 
ing the  great  accomplishments  of  the  past,  are 
ready  to  bring  out  of  their  treasures  things  new 
and  old — the  old  as  well  as  the  new.  And  in  these 
days  when  great  numbers  of  people  do  not  know 
what  they  believe  or  why  they  should  believe  any- 
thing, it  is  of  great  significance  that  we  have  this 
sturdy,  faithful,  conscientious  body  of  Christians 
bent  on  holding  fast  all  that  has  shown  itself  good. 

In  the  second  place  the  Presbyterian  Church  has 
kept  alive  a  profound  sense  of  the  enormity  and 
the  ill-desert  of  sin.  This  church  takes  the  moral 
life  of  the  race  seriously.  It  has  never  fallen  into 
the  way  of  thinking  of  evil  as  only  good  in  the  mak- 
ing or  of  saying  that  wickedness  is  a  kind  of  im- 
mature, half-baked  goodness.  It  would  have  no 
sympathy  with  R.  J.  Campbell  of  London  in  his 
claim  that  "the  drunkard  reeling  through  the 
streets  in  brutal  fashion  is  after  all  only  engaged  in 
a  mistaken  quest  for  God.'  It  does  not  believe  that 
the  sinner  will  naturally  and  easily  grow  up  out 
of  his  sin  into  the  goodness  of  a  saint  by  a  process 
of  evolution.  It  believes  as  the  apostle  did  that 
"men  have  given  themselves  up  to  uncleanness 


62  OUR    TOTAL    CHRISTIANITY 

through  the  lusts  of  their  hearts;  that  they  have 
become  vain  in  their  imaginations  and  their  minds 
have  become  darkened;  that  they  have  changed  the 
truth  of  God  into  a  lie  and  that  the  wrath  of  God 
is  revealed  from  heaven  against  all  ungodliness  and 
unrighteousness.'  The  Presbyterian  Church  has 
the  sense  of  sin. 

It  may  be  questioned  if  any  more  terrible  bat- 
teries have  ever  been  turned  upon  the  wrong-doing 
of  the  world  than  those  of  Calvinism.  When  certain 
branches  of  the  church  were  granting  indulgences 
on  easy  terms,  allowing  men  to  clear  up  their  moral 
accounts  by  private  arrangements  with  their  con- 
fessors; when  others  were  insisting  that  the  waters 
of  baptism  would  instantly  wash  away  whatever 
stain  or  corruption  might  cling  to  the  moral  nature ; 
\vhen  others  were  speaking  gently  of  the  evil  in 
the  world  as  a  kind  of  childish  aberration,  ' '  a  grow- 
ing pain/  the  Presbyterian  churches  have  been 
steadily  insisting  that  sin  is  an  act  of  rebellion 
against  rightful  authority ;  that  it  is  an  insult  and 
an  outrage  to  the  love  of  a  holy  Father ;  that  it  is 
a  heinous  and  fatal  corruption  of  the  nature,  to  be 
cured  only  by  supernatural  grace  and  divine  re- 
demption. The  chief  end  of  man,  as  they  view  it, 
is  not  to  have  a  good  time  or  to  cultivate  his  own 
powers  or  to  ' '  evolute ' '  into  his  own  completer  self- 
'the  chief  end  of  man  is  to  glorify  God  and  enjoy 
Him  forever.'  And  as  the  beginning  of  that  life 
which  is  riot  self-centered,  but  finds  its  center  in 


THE    PRESBYTERIAN    PART  63 

the  Divine  glory,  there  must  come  a  recognition 
of  the  fault  and  the  corruption  of  the  individual 
life. 

And  is  there  not  cause !  We  have  put  rubber 
tires  on  our  consciences  and  upon  the  words  we 
apply  to  evil  in  these  comfortable  days,  lest  any 
malefactor  should  receive  shock  or  jar.  Lying  is 
only  "prevarication!'  Stealing  is  "an  unfortunate 
kleptomania!'  Lust  is  only  "the  unschooled  throb- 
bin  gs  of  nature"  according  to  many  a  problem  play 
and  modern  novel.  Graft,  of  the  Patrick  Calhoim 
type,  is  not  civic  treachery  and  crime  as  it  once  was 
-it  is  only  "one  of  the  exigencies  of  business  life 
under  the  intricate  conditions  of  modern  industry.' 

So  on  down  the  list !  If  we  keep  on  mixing  our 
icolors,  by  and  by  nothing  will  be  wrong !  And 
when  nothing  is  wrong,  when  the  power  of  hating 
evil  is  lost,  then  the  race  will  be  morally  bankrupt. 
All  honor  to  that  branch  of  the  Christian  church 
which  has  maintained  its  keen  sense  of  the  ill- 
desert,  the  enormity  and  the  infamy  of  sin  against 
God  in  all  its  ugly  forms ! 

The  wholesome  effect  of  this  attitude  has  been 
witnessed  on  many  fields.  You  may  recall,  for 
example,  the  austere  morality  of  Cromwell's  Army, 
which  is  unparalleled  in  the  military  annals  of  the 
world.  Army  life  is  often  a  school  of  vice ;  it  be- 
comes the  crucial  test  of  morals  and  religion.  But 
the  army  of  Ironsides  became  the  wonder  of  the 
world  for  its  moral  purity  no  less  than  for  its  in- 


64  OUR    TOTAL    CHRISTIANITY 

trepid  valor.  They  marched  against  the  most  re- 
nowned battalions  of  Europe,  chanting  their  psalms 
and  relying  upon  the  Unseen  God — and  somehow 
they  seemed  never  to  fail  in  destroying  whatever  op- 
posed them.  It  is  the  testimony  of  Macaulay,  of 
Goldwin  Smith,  of  Morley  and  of  all  the  historians 
who  touch  upon  that  period  of  history  that  no  army 
has  ever  so  combined  heroism  and  purity.  'In  that 
camp  no  oath  was  heard,  no  drunkenness  witnessed, 
110  gambling  seen.  The  property  of  man  and  the 
honor  of  woman  were  alike  safe.  No  servant  girl 
was  compelled  to  mourn  by  the  rough  gallantry  of 
these  red-coats.  Not  an  ounce  of  plate  was  stolen 
from  the  shops  of  the  goldsmiths.'  All  this  from 
Macaulay's  "History  of  England,"  and  Taine  adds, 
'They  raised  the  national  morality  even  as  they 
had  saved  the  national  liberty!'  And  this  was  an 
army  of  Calvinists,  taking  scripture  texts  for  their 
watch-words  and  countersigns,  singing  the  hymns  of 
the  faith  as  their  battle  cries !  They  cherished  a 
profound  sense  of  the  malignity  and  the  hatefulness 
of  sin,  and  thus  they  trampled  temptation  under 
their  feet  even  as  they  put  their  enemies  to  flight. 
The  third  contribution  of  the  Presbyterian 
Church  has  been  its  devotion  to  the  Bible.  No 
other  denomination  has  equalled  it  in  attributing, 
as  the  result  of  painstaking  scholarship,  such  unique 
and  final  authority  to  the  Bible.  The  head  and 
front  of  Dr.  Briggs'  offending  was  not  so  much 
that  he  taught  that  the  Pentateuch  was  composed 


THE    PRESBYTERIAN    PART  65 

of  manv   and  sometimes   conflicting   documents,   or 

«/ 

that  the  book  of  Isaiah  was  the  work  of  more  than 
one  man !  It  was  that  he  claimed  in  his  celebrated 
address  that  there  were  three  sources  of  authority 
in  religion — the  Bible,  which  was  the  classic  utter- 
ance of  the  mind  of  the  Lord  in  literature ;  the 
Church  as  the  utterance  of  the  Divine  Spirit  to  be 
found  in  the  great  consensus  of  human  experience 
and  testimony  throughout  the  ages  of  Christian 
history ;  and  Keason,  the  noblest  faculty  in  man  act- 
ing at  its  best  in  pronouncing  upon  the  validity  of 
the  claims  of  religion.  The  Bible,  the  Church  and 
Reason  were  concurrent  sources  of  authority  ac- 
cording to  Dr.  Briggs,  and  this  exaltation  of  two 
other  sources  of  instruction  to  the  place  where  they 
would  share  in  the  unique  honor  attributed  to  the 
Bible  became  to  a  large  majority  in  the  Presby- 
terian Church  insupportable. 

This  exaltation  of  the  Bible  by  the  Presbyterians 
has  not  been  like  the  position  of  Salvation  Army 
officers,  or  other  earnest  mission  workers,  voicing 
merely  a  traditional  and  sentimental  attitude.  The 
Presbyterian  Church  has  been  distinguished  from 
the  first  for  painstaking  and  profound  scholarship. 
The  Westminster  Confession  is  not  made  up  of  a 
lot  of  pious,  well-meaning,  but  ill-considered  plati- 
tudes— it  is  painfully  and  rigidly  learned.  The  Pres- 
byterian Church  has  had  great  doctors  of  the  faith 
-the  Hodges  and  the  Alexanders  of  Princeton, 
Shedd  and  Schaff,  James  McCosh  and  Francis  L. 


66  OUR    TOTAL    CHRISTIANITY 

Patton,  Roswell  D.  Hitchcock  and  Marvin  R.  Vin- 
cent, Francis  Brown  and  B.  B.  Warfield.  They  were 
men  who  had  studied  the  subject;  they  were  com- 
petent to  speak.  They  knew  exactly  what  they  be- 
lieved and  why  they  believed  it,  and  were  not  to 
to  be  badgered  out  of  it  by  the  flourishes  of  a  few 
popular  novelists  or  the  flings  of  some  newspaper 
reporters,  who,  theologically  speaking,  did  not  know 
their  right  hands  from  their  left.  And  out  of  their 
scholarship  these  scholars  came  with  one  accord  to 
exalt  the  Bible  for  its  inspiration,  its  final  authority, 
its  inerrancy. 

Now  we  may  not  hold  with  these  men  in  all  their 
views — I  for  one  cannot  hold  with  them — but  that 
attitude  has  given  an  impetus  to  Bible  study.  It 
lay  at  the  root  of  the  strong  insistence  of  the  Pres- 
byterians upon  high  standards  of  ministerial  educa- 
tion. One  reason  why  the  Presbyterian  Church 
stands  third  today  in  this  country  in  point  of  num- 
bers is  that  it  was  not  ready  to  utilize  men  without 
college  or  seminary  training  as  were  the  Baptists 
and  Methodists  in  their  frontier  work.  This  exal- 
tation of  the  Bible  has  promoted  a  thorough  and 
systematic  study  of  the  scriptures  in  their  Sunday 
Schools  and  in  the  homes  of  their  people.  It  has 
encouraged  all  the  members  of  the  church  to  be- 
come competent  to  understand  and  rightly  divide 
these  words  of  truth  which  are  the  final  source  of 
authority  in  all  matters  of  faith  and  practice.  And 
in  these  days,  when  critical  study  and  the  purely 


THE    PRESBYTERIAN    PART  67 

literary  treatment  of  the  Bible  have  been  unsettling 
the  faith  of  many  and  have  been  lowering  the  Bible 
in  the  estimation  of  others,  this  supreme  honor 
placed  upon  the  word  of  God  by  this  branch  of  the 
church  has  been  of  inestimable  worth. 

In  the  fourth  place,  the  Presbyterian  Church  has 
stood  strongly  for  the  value  of  an  intelligent  Chris- 
tian nurture.  You  might  indicate  a  certain  difference 
here  by  the  words  "crisis'  and  "process.'  The 
sacramental  idea  of  religion  makes  much  of  the 
crisis — the  unbaptized  individual  is  unregenerate,  but 
holy  water  in  the  hands  of  an  officiating  priest  ap- 
plied to  the  child  or  to  the  believing  adult  will  cause 
him  to  pass  instantly  from  death  unto  life.  The 
emotional  type  of  religion  makes  much  of  the  crisis 
-if  there  can  only  come  an  overturning,  an  over- 
whelming crisis  in  the  feelings  of  the  individual 
then  in  that  hour  he  may  enter  upon  a  regenerate 
life. 

But,  according  to  the  other  view,  religion  is 
phrased  rather  in  terms  of  domestic  life,  the  Father 
bringing  up  his  children  gradually  into  conscious, 
obedient,  joyous  fellowship  with  himself;  or  it  may 
be  phrased  in  terms  of  education,  the  Master  of  our 
spirits  leading  'his  disciples,  pupils,  learners  out 
into  self-realization  by  self-expression  in  wor- 
ship, in  service  and  in  fellowship  with  Him.  Here 
salvation  is  a  moral  process,  conducted  by  the  Spirit 
of  God  in  the  hearts  of  teachable  men. 

The  Presbyterian  churches  have  made  much  of  this. 


68  OUK   TOTAL   CHRISTIANITY 

By  thorough  religious  instruction  in  the  homes 
oil  its  people  it  has  aimed  to  hold  its  own  children 
within  the  power  of  Christian  nurture.  It  main- 
tains that  the  ideal  is  for  the  child  never  to  know 
the  hour  when  he  does  not  live  in  the  love  and  the 
service  of  God.  Family  discipline,  family  prayer,  the 
instruction  of  children  in  the  catechism  and  the 
maintenance  of  the  offices  of  Christian  culture  in 
the  home  have  been  of  unspeakable  advantage  to 
this  branch  of  the  church.  Its  course  of  action 
has  been  a  lesson  and  an  example  to  Christian  peo- 
ple of  all  communions.  In  recent  years  the  Pres- 
byterian Church  has  shown  more  interest  in  revivals, 
putting  its  strength  behind  J.  Wilbur  Chapman  and 
other  evangelists,  but  formerly  it  held  aloof  from 
the  sudden  and  startling  modes  of  awakening  re- 
ligious interest.  It  placed  its  emphasis  upon  the 
quieter  and  in  the  long  run  the  more  reliable  modes 
oi  Christian  nurture  for  the  extension  of  the  King- 
dom. 

This  church  has  rendered  noble  service  in  the  his- 
tory of  our  country.  It  has  had  great  preachers 
of  the  gospel  of  Christ — John  Hall  and  Theodore 
Cuyler,  Howard  Crosby  and  Charles  H.  Parkhurst, 
Herrick  Johnson  and  Henry  Van  Dyke!  By  their 
strong,  winsome  and  effective  presentation  of  the 
truths  of  religion  they  have  made  us  all  their 
debtors.  It  has  written  a  noble  record  in  the  work 
of  Home  and  Foreign  Missions — Jessup  and  Thomp- 
son in  Syria.  John  G.  Pat  ton  in  the  New  Hebrides 


THE    PRESBYTERIAN    PAKT  69 

and  Sheldon  Jackson  in  Alaska,  Arthur  T.  Pierson, 
one  of  the  most  useful  writers  on  missions  in  our 
century,  and  other  men  honored  in  the  field  of  Chris- 
tian effort.  It  has  reared  up  a  splendid  body  of 
intelligent,  conscientious  and  influential  laymen. 
When  we  call  the  roll  of  Presbyterian  presidents, 
senators  and  jurists,  we  find  it  a  long-  and  worthy 
roll  of  honor.  By  its  conservative  temper,  by  its 
sense  of  the  awfulness  of  wrong-doing,  by  its  de- 
votion to  the  Bible,  and  by  its  emphasis  on  the  Chris- 
tian nurture  of  the  child,  it  has  made  a  distinct  and 
valuable  contribution  to  our  total  Christianity. 


THE  ROMAN  CATHOLIC  PART 


T 


HERE  is  not  and  never  was  on  this  earth 
a  work  of  human  policy  so  well  deserv- 
ing of  examination  as  the  Roman  Catholic 

Church.      The  history  of  that  church  joins 

together  the  two  great  ages  of  human  civiliza- 
tion. No  other  institution  is  left  standing  which 
carries  the  mind  back  to  the  times  when  the  smoke 
of  sacrifice  arose  from  the  Pantheon  and  leopards 
and  tigers  leaped  upon  their  victims  in  the  Coliseum 
at  Rome.  The  proudest  royal  houses  are  but  of 
yesterday  when  compared  with  the  long  line  of 
Supreme  Pontiffs  in  the  Vatican.  The  Roman  Cath- 
olic Church  was  great  and  respected  before  the 
Saxon  set  foot  in  Britain,  before  the  Frank  had 
passed  the  Rhine,  when  Grecian  eloquence  still  flour- 
ished in  Antioch  and  idols  were  worshipped  in  the 
temple  at  Mecca.  And  she  may  still  exist  in  undim- 
inished  vigor  when  some  traveller  from  New  Zea- 
land shall  in  the  midst  of  a  great  solitude  take  his 
stand  on  a  broken  arch  of  London  Bridge  to  sketch 
the  ruins  of  St.  Paul.' 

Thus  spoke  Macauley,  one  of  the  most  widely 
read  historians  of  the  English  speaking  race,  in  his 
celebrated  essay  on  Von  Ranke's  "Lives  of  the 


THE  ROMAN  CATHOLIC  PART  71 

Popes.'  Make  all  due  allowance,  as  we  must,  for 
the  superabundant  rhetoric  and  enthusiasm  which 
rendered  him  more  admirable  as  a  brilliant  essayist 
than  as  an  accurate  historian,  and  we  still  have  a 
judgmeint  which  causes  men  to  reflect.  It  directs 
the  mind  toward  a  subject  which  must  be  taken 
into  serious  consideration  by  everyone  interested  in 
human  progress.  The  Roman  Catholic  Church,  how- 
ever we  may  disagree  with  many  of  its  dogmas  or 
condemn  great  sections  of  its  history,  is  not  only 
ajncient  and  august,  it  is  a  world-wide  and  tremend- 
ously significant  fact. 

I  have  not  time  to  sketch  its  history,  whole 
periods  of  which  are  so  dark  as  to  have  utterly 
destroyed  the  influence  of  any  institution  less  pa- 
tient or  less  resilient.  I  have  not  time  to  discuss 
its  various  doctrines,  of  which  it  has  more,  and 
more  incredible  ones,  than  any  other  branch  of  the 
Christian  church.  I  have  not  time  to  indicate  all  of 
the  points  at  which  I  dissent  radically  from  its  posi- 
tions touching  questions  of  education,  civil  author- 
ity and  intellectual  outlook.  It  would  take  at  least 
seven  sermons  cm  this  one  church  alone  for  me  to  do 
that  with  anything  approaching  seriousness  or 
thoroughness. 

I  am  not  of  those  who  either  fear  or  hope  that  it 
will  at  last  swallow  us  all  up.  In  the  last  three  hun- 
dred years  it  has  been  far  from  holding  its  own  in 
the  world  at  large,  either  in  numbers,  in  influence 
or  in  vitality.  Within  the  last  two  months  a  notable 


72  OUR    TOTAL    CHRISTIANITY 

volume  has  appeared  on  "The  Leakage  of  Catholi- 
cism,' basing  its  calculations  upon  the  figures  and 
statements,  the  estimates  and  opinions  of  Romatn 
Catholic  authorities.  A  well-known  Roman  Catholic 
bishop  had  shown  that  by  the  natural  increase  of 
their  share  of  the  population  and  by  the  immense 
gains  through  immigration  from  Catholic  countries, 
the  adherents  of  that  communiotn  in  this  country 
should  number  today  at  least  thirty-twro  millions, 
whereas,  they  only  number  about  eleven  millions. 
It  was  the  judgment  of  this  writer  based  upon  Ro- 
man Catholic  testimony  that  the  total  leakage  from 
that  church  during  the  Nineteenth  Century 
amounted  to  at  least  eighty  millions  of  communi- 
cants. These  people  did  not  all  become  Protestants 
-alas,  the  great  majority  of  them  became  nothing 
at  all ;  they  became  unbelieving,  irreligious,  spirit- 
ually indifferent,  if  not  scornful  toward  all  religion. 
It  was  James  Anthony  Froude,  Professor  of  His- 
tory iln  Oxford  University,  who  said,  "During  the 
last  three  hundred  years  the  Roman  Catholic  Church 
has  lost  her  hold  on  nine-tenths  of  the  educated 
laymen  in  her  own  communion ;  she  has  compelled 
every  Catholic  government  to  take  from  her  the  last 
fiber  of  secular  and  civil  authority,  depriving  her 
even  of  her  control  over  education.'  Her  oftce 
world-wide  temporal  authority  is  now  limited  to  a 
single  building  in  a  single  city,  the  Vatican  at  Rome. 
The  Pope,  once  elected  and  consecrated,  in  order  to 
keep  up  his  vain  pretence  of  temporal  authority. 


THE  ROMAN  CATHOLIC  PART  73 

never  leaves  the  walls  of  the  Vatican,  for  by  doing 
so  he  would  become  at  once  a  subject  of  the  secular 
government  of  Italy. 

"In  the  Sixteenth  and  Seventeenth  Centuries  the 
the  Roman  Catholic  Church  destroyed  by  fagot  and 
sword  the  lives  of  hundreds  of  thousands  of  men 
and  women  in  the  effort  to  recover  that  former 
dominion.  But  today  if  it  should  attempt  that,  if 
it  should  lay  hands  upon  a  single  'heretic  and  dis- 
pose of  him  as  it  used  to  do  at  the  stake ;  if  one 
helpless  man  should  now  be  burned  at  Rome  for  his 
Protestant  heresy,  every  sane  man  believes  that  the 
whole  ecclesiastical  fabric,  mighty  and  imposing  as 
it  is,  would  be  torn  to  shreds  by  the  moral  indigna- 
tion of  the  race.'  No,  the  world  moves,  even  in  the 
Vatican  at  Rome,  and  when  we  take  the  wider  view 
we  see  that  there  is  no  danger  that  the  old  preten- 
sions, which  once  struck  terror  to  the  hearts  of  the 
nations,  should  again  become  anything  but  the  sen- 
timental mutterings  of  an  impotent  bigotry. 

But  as  I  have  indicated  repeatedly,  the  main  pur- 
pose of  this  course  is  not  controversial,  and  I  wish 
to  ask  what  positive  and  distinctive  contributions 
the  Roman  Catholic  Church  has  made  to  our  total 
Christianity.  The  first  one  lies  in  their  inculcation 
of  the  habit  of  worship.  All  church  people  worship, 
but  Catholics  we  may  say,  not  irreverently,  have 
the  habit  beyond  any  others.  Little  children  as  soon 
as  they  are  able  to  toddle  up  the  aisle  of  the  church 
and  cross  themselves  with  holy  water  and  bow  be- 


74  OUR    TOTAL    CHRISTIANITY 

fore  the  pictures  and  statues  they  find  there,  are 
steeped  in  the  habit  of  worship.  When  they  be- 
come men  and  women  they  still  feel  strangely  moved 
to  statedly  visit  the  church  and  kneel  before  the 
Lord  their  Maker,  offering  unto  Him  the  adoration, 
the  trust  and  the  allegiance  of  their  hearts.  Every 
Catholic  Church  stands  open  every  day  in  the  week,, 
inviting  the  passerby  to  come  in  and  worship.  No 
service  of  any  kind  may  be  in  progress,  but  there 
are  the  symbols  of  his  faith,  there  is  the  atmosphere 
of  reverence  and  devotion,  and  there  he  will  ever 
find  a  number  of  fellow  beings  seeking  to  unburden 
and  refresh  their  hearts  in  personal  worship. 

I  remember  once  entering  the  great  Cathedral  at 
Milan  early  in  the  morning,  when  it  was  scarcely 
light.  As  I  passed  in,  I  saw  by  the  door  a  dozen 
or  more  huge,  rough  market  baskets,  some  con- 
taining produce,  others  articles  of  clothing  and  oth- 
ers such  trinkets  as  are  sold  on  the  street.  As  I 
moved  up  reverently  near  the  altar  there  were  a 
number  of  peasant  women  to  whom  these  baskets 
belonged.  Their  faces  were  bronzed,  wrinkled,  and 
scarred  by  hard  work,  age  and  exposure.  They  had 
stopped  for  a  few  moments  on  their  way  to  their 
work  to  worship  in  that  magnificent  cathedral,  that 
famous  shrine  visited  every  year  by  thousands  of 
people  from  every  part  of  the  world,  who  come  to 
stand  awe-struck  and  silent  before  the  dignity  and 
beauty  of  its  architecture.  And  the  rough,  shab- 
bily dressed  old  market  women  were  perfectly  at 


THE  KOMAN  CATHOLIC  PART  75 

home  there  in  their  simple  devotions, — no  one 
except  an  American  Protestant  would  have  thought 
of  giving  them  a  single  curious  glance.  And  when 
they  rose  from  their  knees  and  passed  out,  they  had 
gained  some  feeling  of  spiritual  refreshment,  some 
new  consciousness  of  the  sacredness  of  human  life, 
even  under  its  rudest  conditions,  some  added  sense 
of  kinship  with  the  Unseen  One  in  Whose  honor 
this  mighty  temple  of  worship  was  reared.  The 
habit  of  worship  firmly  established  in  the  sentiments 
and  practices  of  the  two  hundred  millions  of  people 
in  that  communion,  how  wonderful  and  how  beauti- 
ful it  all  is ! 

The  second  contribution  lies  in  their  habit  of 
obedience  to  authority.  'Poverty,  chastity,  obedi- 
ence,' these  are  the  three  VOWTS  taken  by  an  army 
of  devoted  men  and  women  of  that  faith.  Renounc- 
ing all  right  or  claim  to  private  property,  and  re- 
ceiving only  a  bare  support,  they  "belong  to  the 
church'  in  a  very  vital  sense,  to  be  used  by  it  as 
may  seem  good.  For  the  sake  of  the  service,  which 
according  to  their  belief  can  be  better  rendered  by 
those  who  are  free  from  any  domestic  responsibility 
and  thus  at  liberty  to  go  and  come  as  their  superiors 
may  direct,  they  refuse  the  sweet  joys  of  family  life. 
And  obedience  immediate,  unquestioning  and  un- 
limited to  the  head  of  the  Order,  this  becomes  for 
them  the  rule  of  life !  This  example  has  its  influence 
upon  the  entire  body  of  Catholics  until  obedience  to 
authority  becomes  a  leading  note  in  their  religious 


76  OUR    TOTAL    CHRISTIANITY 

life.  Private  judgment  and  personal  inclination  are 
trained  to  submit  themselves  to  spiritual  direction 
and  authority. 

I  am  fully  aware  how  deadly  the  habit  of  obedi- 
ence to  unworthy  authority  may  become  in  its  ulti- 
mate influence.  And  for  the  development  of  the 
freer,  braver  type  of  person ality  this  whole  attitude 
of  unquestioning  obedience  may  not  be  the  most 
promising.  This  may  be  one  reason  why  for  three 
centuries  none  of  the  leading  men  of  letters  in  all 
the  world  owe  anything  to  the  patronage  of  the 
Roman  Catholic  Church.  It  is  one  reason  why  in 
all  the  centuries  only  one  of  the  great  poets,  Dante, 
has  come  from  the  Catholic  Church,  although  it  out- 
fciumbers  all  the  other  churches  put  together — 
Shakespeare,  Milton  and  Goethe,  Wordsworth  and 
Byron,  Browning  and  Tennyson  were  all  of  them 
Protestant  poets.  This  whole  habit  of  obedience  to 
authority  has  to  reckon  with  the  growing  spirit  of 
democracy  and  with  the  advance  of  popular  intel- 
ligelnce  in  this  country  more  than  in  some  of  the 
countries  of  the  old  world,  and  it  will  have  to  reckon 
with  all  that  everywhere  in  larger  measure  during 
the  Twentieth  Century.  But  after  making  full  al- 
lowance for  all  this,  the  habit  of  obedience  to  author- 
ity for  great  numbers  of  men  and  women  in  their 
present  stage  of  development  has  tremendous  sig- 
nificance and  value. 

When  I  say  my  prayers  I  thank  God  for  the  Eo- 
man  Catholic  Church.  I  could  not  belong  to  it. 


THE  ROMAN  CATHOLIC  PART  77 

Some  of  its  doctrinal  positions,  the  infallibility  of 
the  Pope,  the  power  of  priestly  absolution  from  sin, 
the  notion  of  the  sacrifice  of  Christ  ijn  the  Mass,  its 
belief  as  to  the  real  presence  of  the  body  and  blood 
of  Christ  in  the  bread  and  wine  at  Communion,  the 
doctrine  of  purgatory,  are  not  only  incredible  to 
me,  they  seem  impossible  to  any  discriminat- 
ing mind.  I  shrink  with  horror  from  some  of  the 
pages  of  history  this  church  has  written  under  papal 
sanction  and  for  which  no  word  of  disapproval  or 
regret  has  ever  been  uttered  by  its  official  repre- 
sentatives. I  would  be  ready  to  oppose  with  all  my 
might  some  of  its  pretensions  to  temporal  authority 
and  some  of  its  encroachments  upon  the  work  of 
public  education  if  it  ever  undertook  to  assert  those 
pretensions  in  this  country  as  they  have  been  as- 
serted in  other  countries  in  former  centuries. 

And  yet  with  all  this  I  thank  God  for  the  Roman 
Catholic  Church.  We  have  not  so  many  moral  forces 
these  days  that  we  can  afford  to  boycott  any  of 
them.  "Un  a  great  house  there  are  not  only  vessels 
of  gold  and  of  silver,  but  also  of  wood  and  of  earth.' 
And  with  all  its  limitations  which  seem  to  us  so 
serious  the  Catholic  Church  does  stand,  and  stand 
effectively  through  the  habit  of  obedience  on  the 
part  of  its  members,  for  reverence  towards  God,  for 
righteousness  of  life  and  for  the  prevalence  of  spirit- 
ual ideals. 

It  has   at  this   moment  under   its   direction  vast 
numbers  of  utntaught  men  and  women  in  Italy  and 


78  OUR    TOTAL    CHRISTIANITY 


in  Spain,  in  Austria  and  in  South  America,  that  we 
would  not  know  what  to  do  with  if  they  suddenly 
threw  off  their  loyalty  to  the  Catholic  Church  and 
undertook  to  become  Protestants.  We  have  in  this 
more  enlightened  land  great  numbers  of  people  in 
all  our  cities  who  are  better  cared  for  in  their  pres- 
ent stage  of  spiritual  development  and  with  the 
temperaments  it  has  pleased  God  to  give  them,  in 
the  Eoman  Catholic  Church  than  they  would  be  by 
the  Presbyterian  Church  or  the  Congregational 
Church. 

My  good  friend  and  neighbor,  Father  McNally, 
himself  ain  abstainer,  goes  about  in  West  Oakland 
urging  the  claims  of  his  Father  Mathew  Temper- 
ance Society  upon  many  a  rough  man  who,  by  his 
inheritance  and  surroundings,  is  in  danger  of  being 
overcome  by  the  habit  of  drink,  and  by  virtue  of 
that  authority  which  belongs  to  the  Catholic  priest 
the  good  Father  accomplishes  what  no  Protestant 
clergyman  could  at  present  accomplish.  And  this 
is  a  single  illustration  of  a  single  virtue  in  a  single 
field.  In  keeping  alive  the  sense  of  the  unseen 
world,  in  promoting  the  feeling  of  moral  obligation, 
in  causing  men  to  know  that  there  is  open  to  us  a 
divine  source  of  moral  strength  to  aid  us  in  our 
struggle,  the  unique  authority  of  the  parish  priest 
among  his  people  has  a  value  which  we  are  not 
ready  to  relinquish  from  the  moral  forces  of  the 
community. 

In  mediaeval  times  it  was  this  spiritual  despotism 


THE  KOMAN  CATHOLIC  PART  79 

which  alone  showed  itself  mighty  enough  to  con- 
trol and  subdue  the  turbulent  elements  of  society, 
to  put  the  yoke  on  military  tyrants  and  to  infuse 
some  measure  of  the  spirit  of  mercy  in  those  who 
otherwise  would  have  been  the  cruel  oppressors  of 
their  weaker  fellows.  And  today  in  great  sections 
of  modern  society  the  same  result  in  other  terms 
and  under  other  conditions  is  being  wrought  out,- 
spiritual  despotism  is  holding  in  check  certain  evil 
forces  before  which  less  autocratic  methods  might 
find  themselves  helpless. 

Over  against  a  materialism  which  is  no  closet 
theory  but  a  base  manner  of  life,  over  against  a 
revolutionary  type  of  social  agitation  which  would 
burn  and  slay  to  accomplish  its  desires,  over  against 
the  spirit  of  unchecked  self-indulgence  and  wild 
Bohemianism  which  fears  neither  God,  man  nor 
devil,  the  Roman  Catholic  Church  stands  with  a 
brave  front,  and  lifts  before  the  people  in  picture 
and  statue,  in  anthem  and  prayer,  in  sermon  and 
in  the  personal  word  of  the  confessor,  the  nobler 
ideals  of  the  Son  of  Man.  We  are  not  far  enough 
along  toward  the  millennium  to  turn  round  and 
seek  to  break  in  pieces  that  vessel  of  honor,  even 
though  it  seems  to  us  to  contain  so  much  of  wood 
and  of  earth. 

The  letogth  to  which  this  spirit  of  obedience  will 
go,  almost  passes  belief.  The  story  of  the  Jesuits, 
the  great  order  founded  by  Ignatius  Loyola  to  offset 
the  Protestant  Reformation,  reads  like  a  romance. 


80  OUK    TOTAL    CHRISTIANITY 

The  spiritual  forces  of  Protestantism  have  been 
compared  to  local  militia,  useful  in  cases  of  inva- 
sion but  incapable  of  being  sent  abroad  for  spiritual 
conquest.  Rome  has  her  militia,  but  she  has  also 
her  standing  army,  made  up  of  forces  disposable  at 
a  moment's  (notice  for  any  foreign  service,  however 
distant  or  disagreeable  or  dangerous.  If  it  is  be- 
lieved at  headquarters  that  a  certain  Jesuit  in 
England  or  in  America  would,  because  of  his  talents 
or  character,  be  valuable  among  the  Hottentots  of 
Africa  or  the  Bushmen  of  Australia,  or  the  Es- 
quimaux of  the  frozen  North,  the  next  week  he  will 
be  sailing  to  that  quarter  of  the  world,  and  in  a 
mointh's  time  he  will  be  preaching,  catechising  and 
holding  mass  amid  those  strange  surroundings.  The 
Roman  Catholic  Church  encourages  and  is  able  to 
command  a  measure  of  obedience  to  authority  which 
is  both  a  menace,  where  it  is  unworthily  used,  and 
a  mighty  prophecy  of  spiritual  achievement  where 
it  is  directed  to  noble  ends.  "Whatsoever  he  saith 
unto  you,  do  it,'  -this  was  the  word  uttered  at 
Cana  of  Galilee — aind  in  that  atmosphere  of  com- 
plete and  unquestioning  obedience  the  water  of  life 
was  turned  into  wine. 

The  third  contribution  lies  in  their  promotion  of 
the  spirit  of  trust.  The  Roman  Catholic  Church 
meets  the  human  soul  at  the  very  threshhold  of 
life  and  offers  to  provide  some  satisfying  measure 
of  moral  consecration  and  spiritual  direction  for 
every  important  crisis.  This  is  the  meaning  of  the 


THE  ROMAN  CATHOLIC  PART  81 

seven  sacraments  of  that  church.  Here  is  Baptism 
for  the  new  born  babe,  the  recognition  of  its  spirit- 
ual kinship  with  the  great  body  of  aspiring  souls 
in  the  church,  and  of  its  kinship  with  the  Father, 
Son  and  Holy  Spirit,  ijnto  whose  Triune  name  the 
child  is  baptised.  Here  is  Confirmation  for  the 
child  when  he  reaches  the  age  of  moral  decision  and 
is  ready  to  stand  before  the  world  as  a  professing 
Christian,  prepared  to  take  his  first  communion. 
Here  is  the  sacrament  of  the  Lord's  Supper,  the 
bread  and  wine  transformed  into  the  veritable  body 
and  blood  of  the  Savior  according  to  their  belief, 
that  the  inner  life  may  feed  upon  Him  and  become 
indeed  like  Him.  Here  is  Penance,  where  the  bur- 
dened soul  in  the  confessional,  seeking  to  relieve 
itself  by  breathing  the  story  of  its  moral  failure  into 
the  ear  of  a*  trusted  and  merciful  friend,  gaining 
in  the  assurance  of  human  forgivness  a  deeper  con- 
fidence in  the  divine  forgivness,  has  prescribed  for 
it  certain  acts  of  devotion  or  service  to  be  rendered 
as  an  offset  to  the  wrong  done.  Here  is  the  sacra- 
ment of  Orders,  the  formal  setting  apart  of  one 
man  to  become  a  priestly  mediator  on  behalf  of  his 
fellows.  Here  is  the  sacrament  of  Marriage,  the 
union  of  one  man  and  one  woman  for  life, — and  all 
honor  to  the  Roman  Catholic  Church  for  its  steady 
opposition  to  the  inroads  which  easy  and  hasty 
divorce  has  been  making  upon  the  integrity  of 
the  home — a  copy  of  the  mystic  union  of  Christ  and 
His  church.  And  then  at  the  very  end  of  one's 


82  OUR    TOTAL    CHRISTIANITY 

career  here  is  the  sacrament  of  Extreme  Unction, 
when  the  soul  is  finally  prepared  for  its  solemn  and 
mysterious  journey  into  the  unseen  world  of  eternal 
values. 

All  these  become  to  the  devout  Catholic  outward 
and  visible  signs  of  inward  and  spiritual  grace.  At 
all  the  important  crises  of  his  life  and  touching  all 
its  vital  interests,  the  church  places  these  symbols 
of  an  unseen  economy  of  mercy  and  helpfulness ; 
and  by  the  perpetual  recurrence  of  these  rites  in 
the  appointments  of  his  church  the  believer  is  main- 
tained in  that  attitude  of  trust  which  bestows  the 
sense  of  peace. 

In  these  practical  days,  when  so  many  people  fall 
into  the  way  of  believing  only  in  those  things  which 
can  be  seen  with  the  eyes,  hajndled  with  the  hands 
and  purchased  with  gold,  when  the  things  which  are 
seen  and  temporal  expel  from  their  consideration 
those  unseen  things  that  are  eternal,  it  is  good  to 
have  one  great  branch  of  the  church  inculcating 
steadily,  by  methods  which  have  shown  themselves 
effective,  the  spirit  of  trust  itn  those  intangible  aids 
which  mean  so  much  in  the  gaining  of  the  more 
abundant  life. 

No  church  has  made  so  much  of  that  manifesta- 
tion of  the  divine  mercy  and  sacrifice  for  sin  wit- 
nessed on  Calvary.  Catholics  go  to  Mass  and  the 
Mass  is  to  them  a  visible  enactment  and  repetition 
of  the  sacrifice  on  Calvary  offered  in  atonement  for 
sin.  ''The  hosts  of  people  hurrying  through  the 


THE  ROMAN  CATHOLIC  PART  83 

streets  in  every  city  of  Christendom  at  early  dawn 
on  Sunday  morning  are  not  going  to  hear  some  bril- 
liant man  discuss  an  interesting  problem  or  to  hear 
a  few  gifted  singers  sing;  they  are  going  to  cele- 
brate the  death  of  the  Savior  of  the  world  and  to 
confide  afresh  in  the  great  mystery  of  divine  re- 
demption there  proclaimed.'  On  every  altar,  and  in 
many  a  home,  is  the  crucifix.  The  Stations  of  the 
Cross  are  stages  in  Christ's  progress  toward  Cal- 
vary. The  divine  mercy  revealed  on  Calvary  may 
be  as  the  apostle  said,  "to  the  Jews  a  stumbling 
block,  and  to  the  Greeks  foolishness,'  but  it  is  the 
power  of  God  unto  salvation  to  every  soul  that 
trusts.  And  the  Catholic  Church,  beyond  all  others, 
has  awakened  within  man  the  feeling  of  trust  in  the 
great  fundamental  offers  of  the  Christian  gospel. 

In  the  fourth  place,  they  have  shown  a  wonder- 
ful readiness  for  personal  sacrifice.  This  quality 
is  present  in  all  Christian  churches,  but  I  believe  the 
Roman  Catholic  Church  can  show  a  larger  measure 
of  it  than  any  other  single  church.  It  faces  every 
man  who  would  rise  to  a  position  of  influence  in  the 
organization  with  a  strong  demand  for  self-sacri- 
fice. The  Pope  has  a  palace  and  the  priests  have 
their  clergy  houses,  but  not  a  man  among  them  has 
a  home, — -it  takes  a  woman,  a  wife  and  a  mother,  to 
make  a  home.  Making  all  necessary  allowance  for 
unfaithful  priests,  there  remains  a  great  body  of 
pure  and  true  men  who  have  met  that  demand  for 
self-sacrifice.  It  is  the  very  jewel  and  crown  of  a 
woman's  life  to  love  and  to  be  loved  by  her  hus- 


84  OUR    TOTAL    CHRISTIANITY 

band  and  her  children,  and  to  busy  herself  with  the 
furnishing  and  the  maintenance  of  a  home.  But 
here  a  vast  company  of  women,  Sisters  of  Mercy, 
Sisters  of  Charity,  Little  Sisters  of  the  Poor,  teach- 
ers of  youth  and  friends  of  the  aged,  the  sick  and 
the  outcast,  surrender  those  joys,  and  go  about  the 
streets,  sweet-faced,  quiet-voiced,  pure  hearted  mes- 
sengers of  the  Divine  purpose  in  self-sacrificing  serv- 
ice. You  cannot  go  through  any  city  with  an  open 
mind  and  not  recognize  that  this  church  has  repro- 
duced in  generous  measure  the  spirit  of  Him  who 
went  about  not  to  be  ministered  unto  but  to  minister 
and  to  give  His  life  a  ransom  for  many. 

Its  noble  self-sacrifice  on  many  a  mission  field  has 
written  a  record  as  full  of  romance  and  heroism 
as  the  story  of  apostolic  Christianity.  Father 
Damien  among  the  lepers  of  Hawaii,  Pere  Marquette 
among  the  Indians  of  our  own  Northwest,  Juniper o 
Serra  in  his  mission  work  in  California!  "I,  if  I 
be  lifted  up,  will  draw  all  mein  unto  Me,"  said  One 
of  old  who  knew  what  was  in  man.  It  was  the 
sober  estimate  of  the  Son  of  God  upon  the  power  of 
sincere  love  for  the  souls  of  men  and  the  habit 
of  uncomplaining  sacrifice  on  their  behalf.  And 
with  all  the  errors  of  its  long  and  checkered  career, 
the  Roman  Catholic  Church  does  make  a  splendid 
showing  in  its  display  of  heroic  and  beautiful  self- 
sacrifice. 

I  join  with  you  in  profound  regret  that  an  insti- 
tution so  ancient,  so  extended,  so  wonderful,  is  dis- 
figured by  faults  so  serious  and  menacing.  That 


THE  ROMAN  CATHOLIC  PART  85 

intolerance  toward  the  rest  of  us  as  being  unchristian 
and  without  hope  of  heaven  because  we  are  outside 
its  pale  seems  altogether  inexcusable.  That  intol- 
erance of  which  we  had  a  fresh  illustration  in  the 
recent  action  of  the  Pope  withdrawing  his  permis- 
sion for  Vice-President  Fairbanks  to  visit  him  be- 
cause the  Sunday  before  Mr.  Fairbanks,  himself  a 
Methodist,  had  spoken  at  a  Methodist  Church  in 
Kome,  is  a  moral  blot  on  its  escutcheon.  That  big- 
otry which  makes  friendly  association  between  that 
branch  of  the  church  and  the  other  branches  almost 
impossible,  which  renders  marriages  between  Cath- 
olic and  Protestant  almost  uniformly  productive  of 
friction  and  trouble,  is  a  thing  to  be  deplored !  Its 
attitude  toward  the  public  schools  is  un-American 
and  it  seems  to  us  unchristian.  Its  assumption  of 
the  right  of  temporal  authority  would  be  intolerable 
if  the  church  attempted  to  enforce  it.  Its  readiness 
to  cover  up  its  own  faults  in  the  past  and  its  pres- 
ent unwillingness  to  confess  them  or  correct  them 
is  a  matter  of  profound  regret.  Its  unfriendly  feel- 
ing for  modern  knowledge  and  for  many  of  the 
modern  movements  which  make  for  progress 
occasions  sorrow  to  us  all.  But  with  all  these  off- 
sets we  recognize  that  by  its  habit  of  worship,  by 
its  spirit  of  obedience  to  authority,  by  its  profound 
feeling  of  trust  in  the  unseen  and  by  the  readiness 
of  large  numbers  of  its  adherents  for  self-sacrifice, 
it  has  made  a  great  and  distinctive  contribution  to 
our  total  Christianity. 


THE  UNITARIAN  PART 


T 


HE  doctrine  of  the  Unity  of  God  is  much 
older  than  William  Ellery  Channing.  It 
is  much  older  than  the  Arians  of  the 
Fourth  Century  who  stood  up  to  resist  the 
stout  orthodoxy  of  Athanasius  in  the  Nicene  Coun- 
cil. Abraham,  Isaac  and  Jacob,  Moses,  David  and 
Isaiah  were  all  Unitarians  in  their  thought  of  God. 
The  vast  Moslem  world,  whose  faith  at  its  incep- 
tion was  a  stern  protest  against  the  weak  idolatry 
of  the  Orient,  is  to  this  hour  a  world  of  Unitarians 
-"There  is  no  God  but  Allah,  and  Mahomet  is 
His  prophet.'  The  whole  array  of  Old  Testament 
saints,  of  Moslem  believers  and  of  a  great  company 
of  thoughtful  men  in  all  lands  and  in  all  periods 
of  religious  history,  might  stand  together  in  saying, 
'To  us,  there  is  but  one  God,  the  Father.' 

But  Unitarianism  as  we  ordinarily  use  that  term 
in  its  more  restricted  sense,  applying  it  to  a  certain 
branch  of  the  Christian  Church,  dates  back  in  this 
country  to  about  the  year  1815.  One  hundred  and 
twenty  Congregational  churches  of  New  England 
at  that  time  separated  themselves  from  the  Ortho- 
dox wing  of  the  denomination  which  still  held  to 
the  general  system  of  belief  known  as  Evangelical. 


THE   UNITARIAN   PART  87 


In  Boston  every  Congregational  Church  except  the 
"Old  South"  joined  in  this  new  departure.  They  re- 
tained the  Congregational  form  of  polity  and  in  most 
cases  retained  the  historic  names  and  the  property 
which  had  belonged  to  those  churches  in  the  days 
when  they  still  gave  their  adherence  to  orthodoxy. 

The  ' ' Half-way  Covenant, ' '  in  vogue  in  New  Eng- 
land, an  arrangement  by  which  men  who  were  not 
ready  to  profess  themselves  full-fledged  Christians 
might,  at  least,  sustain  that  relation  to  the  Church 
which  was  demanded  at  that  time  for  participation 
in  civil  affairs,  had  brought  into  the  churches  many 
to  whom  Calvinism  had  been  unacceptable.  There  was 
a  thoughtful  and  conscientious  reaction  against  some 
of  the  excessess  and  some  of  the  preaching  connected 
with  '  *  the  Great  Awakening. '  Reason  and  conscience 
alike  were  uttering  substantial  protests  against 
such  teaching  as  that  found  in  Jonathan  Edwards' 
terrible  sermon  on  "Sinners  in  the  Hands  of  An 
Angry  God.'  The  time  was  ripe  for  some  radical 
modification  of  the  religious  teaching  which  had 
become  traditional  with  the  orthodoxy  of  New  Eng- 
land and  the  Unitarian  movement  was  the  clearest 
and  most  influential  expression  of  that  demand. 

The  liberal  party  was  not  very  large  numerically. 
The  Unitarian  denomination  today  is  still  one  of 
the  smallest  of  the  sects,  numbering,  in  this  country, 
only  some  seventy-five  thousand  members.  It  is 
a  party  to  be  weighed  rather  than  counted.  But 
it  has  registered  a  profound  and  wholesome  im- 


88  OUR    TOTAL    CHRISTIANITY 

press  upon  the  religious  belief,  upon  the  literature, 
upon  the  philanthropy  and  upon  the  civic  purposes 
of  the  Nation.  No  one  who  understands  its  early 

•/ 

history  and  the  real  quality  of  the  men  who  gave 
direction  to  its  development  in  those  days  will 
ever  speak  scornfully  or  even  slightingly  of  the 
Unitarian  Church. 

The  main  contributions  which  it  has  made  to  our 
total  Christianity  seem  to  me  to  be :  First,  its  steady 
insistence  upon  a  reasonable  faith.  In  those  early 
days  when  the  most  rigorous  form  of  Calvinism 
was  to  the  fore  the  Unitarian  movement  had  also 
its  'five  points/  and  very  different  points  they 
were  from  the  five  points  of  Calvinism. 

It  stood  for  the  real  and  universal  Fatherhood 
of  God.  "To  us  there  is  but  one  God,  the  Father," 
they  said,  and  all  these  legal,  forensic,  mediatorial 
schemes  of  salvation  must  either  square  themselves 
with  that  fundamental  fact  or  they  must  stand 
aside  to  give  men  the  open  vision  of  the  Father. 

It  stood  for  the  actual  humanity  of  Christ.  In 
their  insistence  upon  his  divinity  the  orthodox  party 
had  obscured  the  fact  that  whatever  else  Christ 
may  be  He  was  a  man,  born  of  a  woman,  tempted 
in  all  points  like  as  we  are,  subject  to  the  laws  of 
growth,  of  pain  and  of  death.  The  Unitarian  stood 
for  the  actual  humanity  of  Christ,  not  a  mask,  or 
a  pretense,  but  a  genuine  humanity  which  tasted  the 
human  situation  to  the  full  for  every  man. 

It  insisted  on  the  function  of  historv,  not  onlv 


THE   UNITARIAN   PAET  89 

Hebrew  history,  but  all  history,  as  a  revelation 
of  God.  The  Unitarians  boldly  affirmed  that  God 
had  not  left  himself  without  witness  in  any  land 
or  in  any  age. 

It  placed  the  Bible  at  the  center  of  a  vaster  reve- 
lation of  the  mind  of  the  Lord  through  literature — 
the  relation  of  the  Bible  to  other  books  of  spiritual 
worth  being  germinal  rather  than  exclusive  of  their 
claims  to  some  measure  of  inspiration. 

It  insisted  that  salvation  is  a  moral  process  con- 
ducted by  the  spirit  of  God  in  the  lives  of 
thoughtful,  obedient  and  aspiring  men — a  moral 
process  not  a  legal  or  mechanical  arrangement  im- 
puting man's  guilt  to  an  atoning  Savior  or  imputing 
the  righteousness  of  Christ  to  unrighteous  men  by 
some  sort  of  theological  shuffle.  It  was  a  moral  pro- 
cess in  which  the  spirit  of  the  living  God  was  utiliz- 
ing not  only  dogma  and  sacrament  but  many  other 
competent  agencies  which  could  be  made  to  con- 
tribute to  moral  growth. 

Here  are  five  points — the  Fatherhood  of  God,  the 
humanity  of  Jesus,  the  function  of  history  as  a  reve- 
lation of  God,  the  germinal  relation  of  the  Bible 
to  a  vaster  body  of  sacred  literature  and  the  con- 
ception of  salvation  as  a  moral  process — all  of  them 
reasonable,  all  of  them  scriptural,  all  of  them  help- 
ful !  They  have  been  so  far  accepted  by  all  the 
more  intelligent  and  open-minded  branches  of  the 
church  as  to  seem  to  many  of  us  commonplace,  but 
time  was  when  it  cost  many  a  man  the  affection  and 


90  OUK    TOTAL    CHRISTIANITY 

confidence  of  his  associates  in  Christian  effort  to 
openly  insist  upon  these  five  points  of  a  reasonable 
faith. 

It  was  a  protest  sorely  needed.  The  Unitarians 
of  that  day  stood  out  against  a  doctrine  of  the 
Trinity,  which  meant  practically  three  distinct  Gods. 
They  opposed  a  view  of  Christ  which  altogether 
slighted  his  humanity  in  the  interests  of  a  certain 
plan  of  salvation.  They  condemned  that  narrower 
view  of  history  which  left  great  sections  of  human 
interest,  past  and  present,  quite  outside  the  pale  of 
God's  love  and  care.  They  put  their  strength  against 
that  conception  of  salvation,  which  represented  it 
as  something  outward,  legal,  mechanical.  They  re- 
fused to  set  religion  in  conflict  with  the  intelligence 
and  moral  wealth  of  the  world  where  these  were 
found  not  allying  themselves  with  the  theological 
positions  of  Calvinism.  And  as  Dr.  George  A.  Gor- 
don of  the  Old  South  Chuch,  Boston,  has  pointed 
out,  their  protest  at  these  points  was  ''Tremendous, 
magnificent,  wholesome.'  It  was  reason  and  con- 
science in  such  wise  and  godly  men  as  Channing 
and  Dewey,  Theodore  Parker  and  James  Freeman 
Clarke,  William  C.  Gannett  and  William  H.  Furness 
arraying  themselves  against  certain  theological 
claims  which  were  neither  reasonable  nor  moral. 

It  was  therefore  an  ethical  no  less  than  an  intel- 
lectual protest.  It  would  be  difficult  to  name  two 
men  in  the  Nineteenth  Century  in  whom  the  moral 
sense  was  more  keenly  alive  than  in  William  Ellery 


THE   UNITARIAN   PART  91 

Clianning  and  James  Martineau.  It  was  the  spirit- 
ual passion  of  their  own  great,  warm  hearts  which 
moved  them  to  defend  the  character  of  God  against 
the  unworthy  implications  put  upon  it  by  some  of 
the  orthodoxy  of  that  day. 

Certain  theories  of  the  Atonement  represented 
God  as  only  allowing  His  anger  against  faulty  men 
to  be  appeased  by  the  sufferings  of  Christ,  upon 
whom  the  full  penalty  of  the  guilt  of  the  whole 
world  was  visited — it  was  a  frightful  doctrine  and 
there  is  no  shred  of  it  in  the  Four  Gospels.  The 
claim  was  made  that  God  in  determining  from  all 
eternity  by  an  unconditional  election  that  certain 
men  should  be  saved  was  under  no  obligation  to 
respect  our  rights  or  interests — it  was  a  doctrine 
as  immoral  as  would  be  the  claim  that  adultery  is 
not  sin.  Go  back  and  read  some  of  the  current 
religious  literature  in  the  last  half  of  the  Eigh- 
teenth Century  and  you  will  understand  how  some 
of  the  choicest  spirits  this  country  has  ever  pro- 
duced went  out  from  the  larger  orthodox  body  of 
Christian  believers,  impelled,  indeed,  by  reason 
and  by  a  truer  knowledge  of  what  the  Bible  actually 
teaches,  but  impelled  still  more  by  their  own  honest 
hearts  and  faithful  consciences. 

It  was  a  protest  overdone  in  many  instances — • 
when  the  pendulum  swings  it  sometimes  swings  too 
far.  In  the  minds  of  many  people  God  the  Father 
became  grandfatherly,  the  thought  of  moral  rigor 
and  disciplinary  purpose  in  His  attitude  toward  us 


92  OUR    TOTAL    CHRISTIANITY 

was  obscured.  In  some  minds  '  *  the  dignity  of  human 
nature' '  was  such  that  man  did  not  need  a  Saviour, 
did  not  need  forgiveness,  renewal,  strengthened 
purpose  in  order  to  attain.  To  certain  light-hearted 
people  today  all  literature  is  so  full  oC  what  they 
are  pleased  to  term  'inspiration'  that  it  does  not 
matter  whether  men's  minds  are  ever  fed  on  the 
great  conceptions  and  aspirations  of  David  and 
Isaiah,  of  John  and  Paul,  or  of  our  Lord  Himself- 
Emerson  and  Hegel,  Shelley  and  Walt  Whitman 
will  be  quite  enough.  These  friends,  as  a  rule, 
speedily  reveal  the  fact  that  they  have  been  reared 
on  spiritual  gruel  altogether  too  thin  to  make  them 
morally  robust.  But  the  Unitarian  movement  is  not 
to  be  judged  by  its  worst — nor  altogether  by  its 
best, — but  by  the  main  trend  and  drift  of  its  influ- 
ence upon  the  religious  life  of  the  Nineteenth  Cen- 
tury. It  was  at  its  inception  an  emergency  move- 
ment shaped  up  with  reference  to  the  necessities  of 
a  specific  historic  situation — it  has  continued  until 
in  a  very  substantial  and  wholesome  way  it  has 
made  good  its  protest  in  the  more  reasonable  and 
scriptural  positions  held  by  all  the  churches  of 
Christ. 

And  when  we  come  to  view  it  as  a  movement  of 
thought  and  life,  rather  than  a  single  denomination, 
we  find  that  Unitarianism  represents  today  and  has 
represented  straight  along  not  so  much  a  body  of 
churches  as  'an  individual  way  of  looking  at  the 
facts  of  life  and  its  problems."  It  is  sometimes 


THE   UNITAKIAN   PAKT  93 

said  by  the  uncircumcised  that  Boston  is  not  a  place 
on  the  map — it  is  "  a  state  of  mind. '  There  is  a  great 
deal  more  truth  than  humor  in  that  epigram.  If  we 
had  some  sort  of  chemical  analysis  by  which  we 
could  detect  the  "traces'  of  the  wide  influence  of 
those  men  and  women  who  for  the  last  two  hundred 
and  fifty  years  have  been  speaking,  writing  and 
acting  in  and  around  Boston,  we  might  all  agree 
that  Boston  is  a  very  noble  and  useful  state  of  mind. 
And  in  similar  fashion  Unitarianism  is  not  so  much 
certain  columns  of  figures  in  the  Year  Book  where 
religious  statistics  are  compiled — Unitarianism  is  "  a 
state  of  mind, ' '  an  individual  way  of  looking  at  the 
problems  of  life  which  is  characterized  by  reason- 
ableness. 

And  the  influence  of  this  way  of  looking  at  things 
can  be  discovered  in  the  entire  religious  life  of  this 
nation.  Hundreds  of  thousands  of  people  who 
walked  in  darkness  have  seen  a  great  light.  Only 
a  small  percentage  of  them  have  been  enrolled  as 
Unitarians,  but  the  more  winsome,  reasonable  and 
creditable  message  of  religion,  to  which  the  influ- 
ence of  this  small  denomination  has  so  largely  con- 
tributed, has  won  their  hearts  to  an  open  allegiance 
to  Jesus  Christ.  Even  the  Salvation  Army,  with 
all  its  "blood  and  fire'  methods  and  theology,  is  a 
nobler  institution  to-day,  because  it  lives  and  works 
in  a  land  where  Emerson  and  Channing,  Lowell  and 
Longfellow,  William  Cullen  Bryant  and  Oliver  Wen- 
dell Holmes,  all  of  them  Unitarians,  have  spoken 


94  OUR    TOTAL    CHRISTIANITY 

to  the  mind  and  conscience  of  the  nation.  The  king- 
dom of  heaven  in  some  of  its  manifestations  is  "like 
a  grain  of  mustard  seed,'  the  outward,  visible,  or- 
ganized expression  of  a  finer  quality  of  life.  The 
kingdom  of  heaven  is  also  "like  leaven,'  silent, 
pervasive,  contagious  but  gradually  leavening  the 
whole  mass  of  which  it  is  an  inconsiderable  part, 
thereby  rendering  it  more  palatable  and  useful  in 
meeting  human  need.  The  emphasis  of  the  Uni- 
tarian upon  the  reasonableness  of  his  religious  faith 
has  been  like  leaven. 

The  second  contribution  made  by  this  denomina- 
tion lies  in  the  breadth  of  its  culture.  When  it  in- 
sisted that  all  history  had  a  function  as  a  revelation 
from  God,  it  summoned  the  devotion  as  well  as  the 
intelligence  of  the  race  to  stand  in  the  presence 
of  all  lands  and  of  all  ages  as  on  holy  ground,  put- 
ting the  shoes  from  off  its  feet  as  it  listened  every- 
where for  additional  accents  of  the  divine  voice. 
When  the  Unitarian  insisted  that  the  Bible  was  pre- 
eminently the  sacred  book,  but  that  all  literature 
worthy  of  the  name  might  have  indeed  some  breath 
of  the  divine  and  share  in  that  wider  sacredness,  he 
gave  a  new  impetus  to  the  interest  thoughtful  and 
devout  men  and  women  might  feel  in  the  best  that 
had  been  thought  and  said  in  literature.  And  it  has 
been  characteristic  of  this  branch  of  the  church 
throughout  to  stand  for  a  noble  breadth  of  culture. 

As  a  consequence  it  has  produced  men  of  letters 
in  numbers  out  of  all  proportion  to  the  size  of  the 


THE   UNITARIAN    PART  95 

denomination.  "Thou  Bethlehem  of  Judea  art  not 
least  among  the  provinces,'  for  out  of  thee  has 
come  a  movement  of  mind  which  has  exercised  a 
renewing  and  controlling  influence  upon  the  thought 
of  our  entire  country!  How  many  of  our  noblest 
names  in  literature  are  the  names  of  Unitarians. 
Ralph  Waldo  Emerson  was  the  pastor  of  a  Unitarian 
church  in  Boston.  Lowell  and  Longfellow,  Bryant 
and  Holmes,  Nathaniel  Hawthorne,  Frances  Park- 
man  and  George  Bancroft,  William  H.  Prescott, 
John  Lothrop  Motley  and  John  Fiske,  Charles  Eliot 
Norton  and  Thomas  Wentworth  Higginson  were  all 
Unitarians. 

In  the  year  1823  Lyman  Beecher,  himself  a  war- 
horse  of  orthodoxy,  wrote  as  follows-  'All  the  lit- 
erary men  of  Massachusetts  are  Unitarians.  All  the 
trustees  and  professors  of  Harvard  College  are  Uni- 
tarians. All  the  elite  of  wealth  and  fashion  in  Bos- 
ton crowd  the  Unitarian  churches.'  They  have,  in 
the  last  hundred  years,  produced  a  royal  company 
of  seers  and  of  singers  whose  messages  of  spiritual 
insight  and  moral  uplift  have  made  us  all  their 
debtors.  It  would  indeed  be  difficult  to  name  any 
other  single  influence  upon  our  youth,  emanating 
from  an  American  mind,  which  has  counted  more  or 
counted  for  better  things  than  the  writings  of  Ralph 
Waldo  Emerson. 

Unitarianism  is  seen  at  its  best  in  Massachusetts, 
c»iid  to  this  day  more  than  half  of  its  total  strength 
is  to  be  found  in  that  one  small  state.  In  the  Mid- 


96  OUR    TOTAL    CHRISTIANITY 

die  West  it  makes  only  a  meager  showing.  In  the 
South  it  is  scarcely  in  evidence  at  all.  Here  on  the 
Pacific  Coast  the  Unitarian  church  often  lacks  the 
distinctive  notes  which  belong  to  it  in  its  home- 
it  may  be  made  up  in  large  measure  of  people  re- 
ligiously disaffected  or  from  a  company  of  religious 
nondescripts  who  do  not  know  what  they  believe 
or  whether  they  believe  anything,  and  so  decide 
that  they  must  be  Unitarians.  All  this  is  an  un- 
worthy travesty  upon  the  true  character  of  this 
branch  of  Christ's  church. 

The  First  Unitarian  Church  here  in  Oakland  suf- 
fered in  this  way  under  the  leadership  of  a  man  who 
was  once  wildly  unreasonable  in  his  flaming  ortho- 
doxy as  a  popular  evangelist,  then  at  a  later  period 
of  his  career  equally  unreasonable  in  some  of  his 
erratic  heresies.  But  we  have  had  also  under  other 
pastors  noble  illustrations  of  those  positive  quali- 
ties for  which  the  Unitarian  church  stands.  Charles 
W.  Wendte,  insistent  upon  a  faith  which  seemed  to 
him  reasonable,  actively  and  intelligently  interested 
in  the  charities  and  philanthropies  of  the  commu- 
nity, the  founder  of  the  Starr  King  Fraternity,  and 
a  helpful  lecturer  on  literature,  on  music,  on  his- 
tory, seeking  ever  to  relate  his  church  in  some  help- 
ful way  to  the  broader  culture  of  the  community- 
in  Charles  W.  Wendte  we  had  an  illustration  of 
those  qualities  for  which  the  real  Unitarian  Church 
undertakes  to  stand ! 

It   was   a   Unitarian   who    founded   the    "Lowell 


THE   UNITARIAN   PART  97 

Institute'  in  Boston,  an  endowed  lectureship  so 
well  maintained  that  from  fifty  to  one  hundred  lec- 
tures are  offered  free  every  winter,  delivered  by 
the  most  eminent  men  in  this  country,  and  oftentimes 
by  men  from  Europe.  In  my  college  days  there  I 
heard  James  Russell  Lowell  give  six  lectures  on  the 
"Early  English  Dramatists,'  and  George  Kennan 
give  his  course  of  lectures  on  Siberia,  when  he  first 
returned  from  his  trip  through  Russia.  I  heard 
Richard  S.  Storrs  lecture  in  his  matchless  way  on 
Bernard  of  Clairvaux,  and  Theodore  Roosevelt  lec- 
ture on  Civic  Reform.  The  service  of  this  nobly 
endowed  lectureship  to  the  community  can  scarcely 
be  overestimated. 

It  was  a  Unitarian  who  generously  endowed  the 
" Boston  Symphony  Orchestra/'  which  by  his  ample 
provision  became  the  first  organization  in  this  coun- 
try to  present,  in  a  manner  which  ranks  with  the 
best  in  Europe,  the  great  musical  compositions  of 
the  masters  of  melody  and  harmony. 

It  was  a  Unitarian  who  founded  "Cooper  Insti- 
tute,' in  New  York,  which  through  its  popular  ap- 
peal and  the  variety  of  its  activities  has  become  one 
of  the  most  useful  institutions  in  that  mighty  city 
in  leading  the  thoughts  of  the  plain  people  to  higher 
things.  It  has  been  characteristic  of  the  Unitarian 
denomination  to  stand  for  breadth  of  culture,  be- 
lieving that  into  the  redeemed  life  of  the  race,  and 
as  far  as  might  be  into  the  life  of  the  individual, 
"the  kings  of  the  earth,'  the  leaders  and  masters 


98  OUR    TOTAL    CHRISTIANITY 

in  every  field  of  human  values,  should  "bring  their 
glory  and  their  honor'  as  into  a  city  that  lieth 
four-square. 

In  the  third  place,  the  Unitarian  Church  has  been 
conspicuous  for  its  contribution  of  a  wise  interest 
in  philanthropic  effort.  This  has  been  no  mere 
cold-hearted,  technical  skill  in  dissecting  the  prob- 
lems of  poverty  and  crime,  of  civic  wrong  and  so- 
cial injustice.  Some  of  the  mightiest  of  the  reform- 
ers have  sprung  from  this  branch  of  Christ's  church, 
bearing  with  them  the  moral  passion  no  less  than 
the  wise  judgment  which  belongs  to  this  denomina- 
tion at  its  best. 

The  men  and  the  women  who  waged  the  earliest 
and  the  hottest  battles  for  the  abolition  of  human 
slavery  recruited  their  ranks  in  large  measure  from 
the  Unitarian  churches.  Channing  himself,  and 
Theodore  Parker,  who  made  Music  Hall  in  Boston 
a  modern  Forurn  for  the  voicing  of  the  public  con- 
science; Charles  Sumner  and  Wendell  Phillips,  Ger- 
ritt  Smith,  Samuel  J.  May,  and  Julia  Ward  Howe 
were  all  of  them  Unitarians. 

And  in  more  recent  times,  in  dealing  with  vice 
and  crime,  in  meeting  the  demands  which  the  chari- 
ties and  the  corrections  of  the  country  are  making 
upon  brain  and  heart,  there  are  few  more  honored 
names  than  those  of  Edward  Everett  Hale  and 
Samuel  J.  Barrows.  I  was  a  visitor  for  the  Asso- 
ciated Charities  in  Boston  twenty  years  ago,  and  at 
that  time  more  than  half  the  money  and  a  great 


THE   UNITARIAN   PART  99 

deal  more  than  half  the  time  and  wisdom  and  love 
spent  in  personal  service  came  from  that  denomina- 
tion, although  it  was  one  of  the  smaller  branches 
of  the  Christian  church  If  one  should  measure  the 
Christianity  of  any  group  of  people  by  the  showing 
they  make  in  embodying  in  their  lives  the  teach- 
ings of  the  parable  of  the  Good  Samaritan  and  of 
the  noble  utterance  of  Christ  in  that  judgment  scene 
portrayed  in  the  twenty-fifth  chapter  of  Matthew- 

'  Inasmuch  as  ye  have  done  it  unto  the  least  of 
these,  ye  have  done  it  unto  me'  -he  would  find 
the  Unitarians  meeting  that  test  in  a  most  satisfac- 
tory way. 

It  has  been  a  broad-minded  philanthrophy.  It 
was  Dr.  Samuel  G.  Howe  who  gave  impetus  and 
direction  to  an  awakening  sentiment  in  Massachu- 
setts for  the  more  efficient  care  of  the  blind.  The 
Perkins  Blind  Asylum  in  South  Boston,  where  Laura 
Bridgman  and  Helen  Keller  received  their  train- 
ing, sprang  out  of  his  efforts.  It  was  Horace  Mann 
who  led  the  way  in  broadening  the  scope  of  educa- 
tion, making  it  include  Manual  Training  for  boys. 
When  he  was  once  urging  the  importance  of  these 
trade  schools  because  of  the  influence,  of  the  use 
of  tools  and  material,  upon  the  character  of  a  boy, 
he  said,  "If  it  only  saved  one  boy  from  vice  and 
crime  it  would  be  worth  all  it  costs.'  At  the  close 
of  his  address  the  man  next  him  whispered,  "Don't 
you  think  that  your  statement  about  'one  boy'  was 


AGO  OUR   TOTAL   CHRISTIANITY 


extravagant?"     "Not  if  it  was  my  boy,"  he  re- 
plied. 

It  is  Edwin  D.  Mead  who,  more  than  any  other 
single  man  in  our  country,  is  arousing  and  educat- 
ing that  sentiment  which  will  oppose  increased  arma- 
ments and  urge  the  reference  of  international  dif- 
ferences to  properly  constituted  international 
courts  as  a  substitute  for  the  barbarous  and  bur- 
densome habit  of  war.  It  is  Charles  F.  Dole,  who 
is  a  leader  in  the  work  of  scientific  temperance  agi- 
tation, bringing  to  bear  upon  the  menacing  evil  of 
the  rum  shop,  the  best  judgment  and  largest  ex- 
perience of  the  nation  to  replace  the  inefficient  and 
intemperate  zeal  of  certain  reformers  who  only 
serve  to  cloud  the  issue.  It  was  George  Angel 
James  who  aroused  the  pity  of  the  country  for  dumb 
animals  and  led  the  movement  which  resulted  in 
the  organization  of  a  society  for  the  prevention  of 
cruelty.  In  every  form  of  philanthropic  effort  you 
will  find  the  intelligent  heads  and  the  warm  hearts 
of  Unitarians  bearing  an  honorable  part  in  these 
efforts  which  make  for  some  just  solution. 

In  civic  affairs  the  Unitarians  have  also  rendered 
notable  service.  The  people  of  California  can  never 
forget  the  debt  of  gratitude  they  owe  to  Thomas 
Starr  King,  pastor  of  the  First  Unitarian  Church, 
San  Francisco,  for  the  far-reaching  influence  he 
exerted  in  helping  to  save  California  to  the  Union, 
and  enlisting  her  on  the  side  of  the  struggle  for  the 
liberty  of  all  men.  Some  of  the  noblest  men  we 


THE   UNITARIAN   PART  101 

have  had  in  the  councils  of  our  nation  have  been 
men  of  that  faith — Charles  Sumner  and  Senator 
Hoar,  John  Hay,  John  D.  Long,  and  many  others 
whose  names  would  fill  a  worthy  roll  of  honor.  The 
movement  for  Civil  Service  Reform  was  greatly  in- 
debted for  the  advancement  of  its  interests  to  in- 
dividual members  of  this  church  and  to  the  organ- 
ized utterance  of  the  church  itself  along  that  line. 
George  William  Curtis,  Thomas  Wentworth  Hig- 
ginson  and  many  another  honored  citizen  stood  up 
to  resist  the  idea  that  "to  the  victor  belongs  the 
spoils'  -they  insisted  steadily  that  a  public  office 
is  a  public  trust. 

Piety  and  patriotism  should  ever  go  hand  in 
hand.  When  the  intelligent  Jews  prayed  for  the 
peace  of  Jerusalem,  they  did  it  both  as  citizens 
and  as  churchmen,  for  Jerusalem  was  the  capital 
of  their  country,  as  well  as  the  site  of  the  temple 
of  God.  And  in  the  Unitarian  branch  of  Christ's 
church  there  has  been  throughout  an  intelligent 
insistence  upon  the  sacredness  of  civic  life  and  the 
importance  of  those  duties  which  belong  to  citizen- 
ship in  the  republic. 

"One  God,  the  Father'  -ours  no  less  than  theirs! 
They  have  not  been  able  to  accept  certain  interpre- 
tations of  the  eternal  mystery  which  we  accept.  We 
cannot  receive  their  estimate  upon  the  person  of 
Christ,  nor  agree  with  certain  views  they  hold,  touch- 
ing other  matters  which  seem  to  us  vital.  With  all 
the  gratitude  I  feel  for  the  service  they  have  ren- 


102  OUR   TOTAL   CHRISTIANITY 

dered,  I  personally  could  not  be  a  Unitarian.  But 
even  here,  though  the  distance  between  ourselves 
and  them  seems  greater  than  that  between  us  and 
some  of  the  other  branches  of  the  Christian  church, 
we  still  rejoice  that  the  agreements  are  more  signifi- 
cant than  the  differences.  And  we  have  been  told 
upon  the  highest  authority  that  the  vital  thing  is 
not  the  ability  or  the  inability  to  say,  "Lord,  Lord!' 
but  the  doing  of  the  will  of  the  Father  who  is  in 
heaven.  In  that  day  many  obedient,  aspiring  souls, 
who  have  differed  widely  in  their  intellectual  in- 
terpretations, will  come,  moved  by  one  common  de- 
sire to  live  in  the  vision  and  service  of  the  best  they 
saw,  and  sit  down  with  Abraham  and  Isaac  and 
Jacob  in  the  kingdom  of  God. 


THE  CONGREGATIONAL  PART 


T 


HE  Congregational  body  takes  its  name 
from  the  fact  that  all  power  is  vested  in 
the  "congregation'  of  the  local  church. 
Any  company  of  Christian  believers  asso- 
ciating themselves  together  for  the  worship  of  God 
and  the  service  of  man  constitute,  according  to  this 
view,  a  complete  church.  This  single  congregation 
standing  alone,  acknowledging  only  Christ  as  the 
head  of  all  the  churches,  is  competent  to  formulate 
its  own  creed,  to  arrange  its  own  mode  of  worship, 
to  elect  and  set  apart  its  own  officers,  pastor,  dea- 
cons and  the  like,  to  manage  its  own  affairs  as  to 
sacraments,  benevolences  and  other  matters  of 
church  life,  as  may  seem  good.  It  receives  and  dis- 
misses members  by  the  vote  of  the  congregation, 
and  does  all  this  looking  to  no  outside  authority 
whatsoever,  bishops,  presbyteries,  conferences  or 
assemblies,  but  only  to  such  guidance  as  may  come 
by  the  Spirit  of  the  unseen  Head  of  the  church.  All 
earthly  authority  inheres  in  the  congregation,  and 
consequently  such  a  church  is  called  a  "  Congrega- 
tional Church.' 

The  four  main  contributions  which  this  branch 
of  Christ's  church  seems  to  have  made  to  our  total 
Christianity  are  these — first,  its  high  confidence  in 


104  OUR    TOTAL    CHRISTIANITY 

a  pure  democracy.  It  trusts  the  people.  It  trusts 
any  group  of  Christian  people  anywhere,  large  or 
small,  rural  or  urban,  simple  or  cultured,  who  have 
been  led  to  organize  themselves  under  the  leader- 
ship of  Christ  into  a  Christian  church. 

The  whole  idea  of  dependence  upon  some  set  of 
officers  placed  over  them  to  tell  them  what  they 
shall  believe  in  their  creeds,  what  they  shall  say  in 
their  prayers  and  their  other  forms  of  worship,  who 
their  pastor  shall  be  and  how  he  shall  be  set  apart 
to  that  office,  is  foreign  to  their  methods.  They 
would  no  more  accept  it  than  they  wrould  accept 
the  idea  that  domestic  life  needs  some  such  official 
supervision.  We  are  a  family  in  the  Lord,  they 
:say — "One  is  our  Master,  even  Christ,  and  all  we 
are  brethren.'  We  acknowledge  no  other  authority 
in  questions  of  creed,  ritual,  ministry  or  service. — 
al]  these  matters  are  to  be  determined  by  each 
church  family  for  itself. 

"From  within  outward,  from  beneath  upward, 
is  the  direction  of  life'  as  Dr.  Storrs  has 
pointed  out.  "in  the  spiritual  no  less  than 
in  the  physical  world.  To  undertake  to  re- 
verse this  process  in  church  life  seems  to  us  as 
unreasonable  as  trying  to  set  a  growing  tree  on  its 

branches  instead  of  its  roots.'  Power  goes  up,  not 
down ;  it  is  derived  immediately  from  the  consent 

of  the  governed. 

You  can  readily  understand  how  such  a  form  of 

w 

church  government  came  to  be.     It  was  a  protest 


THE  CONGREGATIONAL  PART 


105 


against  the  monarchical  spirit  in  religion.  The  prin- 
cipal of  local  self-government  indicated  that  the 
unit  of  sovereignty  in  religious  matters  should  be 
the  local  congregation  of  believers.  The  Congrega- 
tional polity,  therefore,  is  not  monarchical  in  that 
it  refuses  to  be  governed  by  bishops.  It  is  not  a 
representative  form  of  government  in  that  it  de- 
clines the  rule  of  elders.  It  is  a  pure  democracy 
in  that  it  commits  all  power  directly  into  the  hands 
of  the  people. 

Whatever  is  done  in  the  Congregational  Church 
is  done  directly  by  the  vote  of  the  congregation. 
If  a  pastor  is  to  be  called,  if  some  young  man  is  to 
be  ordained  to  the  ministry,  if  a  change  is  to  be 
made  in  the  creed,  if  any  innovation  is  desired  in 
the  ritual  or  the  forms  of  worship,  if  a  new  member 
is  to  be  received,  if  a  member  is  to  be  dismissed  to 
some  other  church,  if  money  is  to  be  given  in  benev- 
olence, if  anything  whatsoever  which  pertains  to 
church  life  is  to  be  done,  no  outside  authority  has 
anything  to  say  in  the  matter.  In  every  one  of  these 
instances  the  initiative  is  taken  by  the  congrega- 
tion. The  pastor  has  no  authority  to  issue  a  letter  of 
transfer  to  a  member  desiring  to  unite  with  another 
church,  as  would  be  the  case  in  the  Episcopal  or  the 
Methodist  Church — this,  too,  must  be  done  by  the 
vote  of  the  congregation. 

In  the  Congregational  Church  the  pastor  himself 
does  not  belong  to  a  separate  class.  He  is  not  a 
member  of  a  conference,  as  is  a  Methodist  pastor, 


106  OUR    TOTAL    CHRISTIANITY 

or  of  a  diocese  as  is  the  rector  in  the  Episcopal 
Church,  or  of  a  Presbytery,  according  to  the  usage 
of  that  denomination.  He  is  a  member  of  the  church 
he  serves,  uniting  with  it  by  letter  from  the  church 
with  which  he  was  last  connected,  like  any  other 
member.  He  is  pastor,  not  because  he  belongs  to  a 
separate  priestly  or  preaching  order,  but  by  virtue 
or.  his  election  to  that  office  by  the  votes  of  his  fel- 
low members  of  the  congregation. 

It  is  the  idea  of  the  New  England  town  meeting 
incorporated  into  church  life.  It  is  pure  democracy, 
in  that  authority  is  not  handed  down  from  above, 
nor  delegated  to  certain  chosen  representatives,  but 
retained  throughout  in  the  hands  of  the  people 
themselves.  It  is  a  form  of  polity  which  is  shared 
by  the  Baptist  and  the  Unitarian  churches,  but  the 
Oongregationalists  were  the  first  to  practice  it,  and 
they  have  placed  upon  it  peculiar  emphasis.  It  is 
their  belief  that  the  earliest  churches  of  apostolic 
times  enjoyed  this  simple  form  of  government.  We 
do  not  find  in  the  New  Testament  any  one  central 
authority  controlling  all  the  churches,  but  each  con- 
gregation proceeded  upon  its  way  with  the  words, 
"It  seemed  good  to  the  Holy  Ghost  and  to  us,"  as 
a  sufficient  sanction  for  its  action.  We  find  refer- 
ences to  "the  church  at  Jerusalem,"  "the  church 
at  Antioch,"  "the  churches  of  Asia,"  and  "the 
churches  of  Cilicia,'  indicating  the  common  usage. 
In  similar  fashion  the  Congregational  people  do  not 
use  the  term  "The  Congregational  Church"  as  com- 


THE  CONGREGATIONAL  PART  107 

prising  all  the  people  of  their  faith — they  speak  of 
"The  Congregational  Churches,'  for  each  congre- 
gation is  a  church  in  itself.  In  committing  all  au- 
thority as  to  creed,  ritual,  and  government  into  the 
hands  of  the  local  congregation  they  assert  their 
confidence  in  the  value  and  efficiency  of  pure  de- 
mocracy. 

The  second  contribution  lies  in  their  intellectual 
breadth.  The  Congregational  attitude  in  matters  of 
belief  may  be  indicated  by  these  familiar  words,- 
"In  essentials,  unity;  in  non-essentials,  liberty;  in 
all  things,  charity.'  We  would  not  place  a  man  in 
a  Congregational  pulpit  who  was  an  atheist,  or  one 
who  denied  the  validity  of  those  principles  of  right 
living  contained  in  the  words  of  Christ,  or  one  who 
set  at  naught  what  are  universally  regarded  among 
Christians  as  the  eternal  verities  of  the  spiritual 
world.  But  upon  the  basis  of  certain  great  funda- 
mentals we  build  a  church  life  which  is  character- 
ized by  large  intellectual  hospitality.  We  have 
among  our  laymen,  and  in  our  ministry,  men  of 
very  conservative  views — Joseph  Cook,  a  kind  of 
arch-defender  of  an  old-fashioned  orthodoxy,  was 
to  the  day  of  his  death  a  Congregational  minister. 
We  have  also  men  of  exceedingly  liberal  and  radi- 
cal opinions — Lyman  Abbott,  editor  of  the  Outlook, 
is  an  honored  and  useful  Congregational  minister. 
John  Robinson  urged  the  Pilgrims  when  they  were 
about  to  sail  for  America,  to  "believe  that  God  had 
much  more  light  to  fall  from  His  Holy  Word, ' '  and 


108  OUR   TOTAL   CHRISTIANITY 

we  have  sought  to  live  with  eyes  and  minds  open  for 
that  fuller  life. 

We  find  it  more  easy  to  maintain  this  theological 
hospitality  because  we  have  no  formulated  articles 
of  religion  or  creed  statements,  which  are  univer- 
sally binding  as  are  the  Articles  of  Religion,  or  the 
Westminster  Confession  in  the  Episcopal,  the  Meth- 
odist and  the  Presbyterian  churches.  Each  local 
congregation  formulates  its  own  creed.  If  the  pas- 
tor is  in  agreement  with  the  creed  of  his  own  church, 
and  if  his  teaching  is  acceptable  to  that  congrega- 
tion to  which  he  ministers,  no  outside  authority  can 
disturb  him. 

Touching  things  fundamental,  we  maintain  a  gen- 
eral consensus  of  belief  among  our  churches,  suf- 
ficient for  harmony  of  action,  by  the  second  prin- 
ciple of  our  polity,  known  as  "the  fellowship  of  the 
churches.'  Each  church  is  expected  to  live  on 
terms  of  fellowship  with  its  sister  churches.  In  the 
decision  of  vital  questions  each  church  is  en- 
couraged to  ask  counsel  from  other  churches,  and  in 
turn  to  give  such  advice  when  it  is  sought  by  neigh- 
boring churches.  It  is  understood,  however, 
throughout  that  this  relation  is  advisory  and  not 
one  of  compulsion.  And  thus  the  churches  living  in 
fellowship  with  one  another  maintain  sufficient  doc- 
trinal agreement  among  themselves,  each  one  form- 
ulating and  adopting  its  own  particular  creed,  to 
secure  that  harmony  of  action  which  lias  been  ours 
for  centuries. 


THE  CONGREGATIONAL  PART  109 

We  strive  to  exhibit  this  breadth,  not  only  in 
questions  of  doctrine,  but  in  matters  of  Christian 
usage.  We  prescribe  no  form  of  worship,  as  is  done 
in  other  branches  of  the  church — if  any  congrega- 
tion should  wish  to  adopt  a  full-orbed  liturgical 
service,  with  prayers,  collects  and  lessons  all  pre- 
scribed, it  would  have  that  privilege.  If  some  other 
congregation  wishes  to  observe  the  utmost  sim- 
plicity, it  enjoys  the  same  liberty.  We  prescribe  no 
fixed  form  for  any  of  the  Christian  rites — we  leave 
the  mode  of  baptism  to  the  conscience  of  the  can- 
didate. In  my  own  ministry  I  have  sprinkled  hun- 
dreds of  people,  and  I  have  also  immersed  a  goodly 
number,  who  preferred  that  mode.  If  any  Congre- 
gational Church  should  decide  to  limit  baptism  to 
adult  believers,  and  to  baptize  only  by  immersion, 
it  would  have  that  right. 

We  build  no  barriers,  doctrinal  or  otherwise, 
around  the  Communion  Table.  We  cordially  invite 
"all  who  love  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ  in  sincerity 
and  truth'  to  commune  with  us  whatever  may  be 
their  church  affiliations  or  their  particular  theo- 
logical belief.  In  matters  of  doctrine  we  are  happy 
in  having  men  of  conservative  temper  among  us — we 
dc  not  wish  to  make  them  uncomfortable  because 
or  their  conservatism.  We  are  happy  in  having 
liberals — we  believe  that  wherever  they  are  sincere 
followers  of  Christ  the  church  He  founded  should 
be  roomy  enough  to  make  them  also  at  home.  As 
we  view  it  the  ultimate  test  of  Christian  disciple- 


110  OUK   TOTAL    CHKISTIANITY 

ship  is  not  theological  theory,  but  love  and  devo- 
tion to  the  Master — "By  this  shall  all  men  know 
that  ye  are  my  disciples,  if  ye  love  one  another.' 

The  third  contribution  may  be  found  in  the  special 
emphasis  laid  upon  education  by  Congregationalists 
everywhere.  I  am  not  intimating  that  the  Congre- 
gational Church  stands  alone  in  this — all  branches 
of  the  church  stand  for  intellectual  training,  but 
its  contribution  to  the  work  of  higher  education 
in  this  country  was  the  earliest  and  has  been  the 
most  remarkable.  The  Pilgrim  Fathers,  a  little 
company  of  empty-handed  people  in  a  new  and  wild 
country  landed  at  Plymouth  in  1620  and  only  six- 
teen years  later,  in  1636,  they  founded  Harvard  Col- 
lege, the  oldest  and  perhaps  the  most  influential 
institution  for  higher  education  in  America. 

The  Congregationalists  founded  Harvard  and 
Yale,  Bowdoin  and  Dartmouth,  Williams  and  Am- 
herst,  Oberlin  and  Beloit,  and  other  colleges  to 
the  number  of  forty-two  in  the  United  States — a 
number  out  of  all  proportion  to  our  size  as  a  de- 
nomination, for  we  are  not  one  of  the  larger  sects. 
And  for  the  higher  education  of  women  the  Con- 
gregationalists founded  Wellelsey  and  Smith,  Mount 
Holyoke  and,  here  at  our  very  doors,  Mills  Col- 
lege, that  women  might  become  the  intellectual  com- 
panions and  associates  of  men  in  all  the  wider  in- 
terests of  their  lives. 

The  one  man  who  has  influenced  the  theological 
thinking  of  experts  in  this  country  more  than  any 


THE  CONGREGATIONAL  PART  111 

other,  the  man  who  ranked  as  the  greatest  theo- 
logian of  the  Eighteenth  Century  in  any  country, 
Jonathan  Edwards,  was  a  Congregational  minister 
at  Northampton,  Massachusetts.  The  two  men  who 
did  more,  perhaps,  than  any  other  two  who 
could  be  named  to  influence  the  popular  mind  to 
accept  more  reasonable  and  more  helpful  views  of 
Christian  doctrine,  Horace  Bushnell,  with  his  em- 
phasis upon  Christian  nurture,  and  Henry  Ward 
I'eecher,  in  his  mighty  protest  against  the  more 
awful  aspects  of  Calvinism,  were  both  Congrega- 
tional pastors. 

And  because  of  this  emphasis  upon  the  value  of 
college  and  seminary  training  this  denomination, 
although  one  of  the  smaller,  has  produced  a  splen* 
did  list  of  great  preachers  in  America- -Beecher  and 
Bushnell,  William  M.  Taylor  and  Richard  S.  Storrs, 
Lyman  Abbott  and  Theodore  T.  Munger,  Washing- 
ton Gladden  and  George  A.  Gordon,  Charles  E. 
Jefferson  and  Amory  H.  Bradford,  Newell  Dwight 
Hillis  and  F.  W.  Gunsaulus !  They  have  been  great 
preachers,  reaching  the  ears,  the  minds  and  the 
hearts  of  the  many  by  the  power  of  their  message 
conveyed,  as  it  has  been,  through  the  medium  of 
trained  and  consecrated  personality. 

This  church  has  produced  a  long  list  of  noble 
aad  useful  educators — Mark  Hopkins,  of  whom  Gar- 
field  said  ''Mark  Hopkins  at  one  end  of  a  log  and 
myself  at  the  other  would  be  college  enough  for 
me";  Timothy  Dwight,  Noah  Porter  and  Theodore 


112  OUR   TOTAL    CHRISTIANITY 

Wolsey  of  Yale,  Austin  Phelps  and  Edwards  Park  of 
Andover,  Charles  G.  Finney  of  Oberlin  and  William 
J.  Tucker  of  Dartmouth,  Mary  Lyon  of  Mt.  Holyoke 
and  Alice  Freeman  Palmer  of  Welles! ey — all  of 
them  Congregationalists. 

The  two  most  widely  read  religious  periodicals 
in  this  country,  the  "Outlook"  and  the  "Independ- 
ent, '  were  both  founded  by  Congregationalists  and 
both  of  them  have  Congregational  ministers  as  their 
managing  editors  to  this  hour.  The  same  emphasis 
on  education  has  enabled  this  branch  of  the  Church 
to  produce  an  unusual  number  of  great  hymn 
writers — Isaac  Watts  and  Phillip  Doddridge,  who 
set  the  praise  of  the  fathers  to  music,  were  both 
Congregationalists.  And  in  more  recent  years  Ray 
Palmer,  whose  "My  Faith  Looks  up  to  Thee'  has 
been  sung  everywhere,  Timothy  Dwight,  Leonard 
Bacon  and  Washington  Gladden  have  contributed 
hymns  which  now  belong  to  the  universal  church. 
Lowell  Mason,  who  for  eighty  years  gave  his 
strength  and  taste  to  the  improvement  of  church 
music  in  such  a  way  as  to  be  called  "the  father  of 
American  church  music,'  was  also  a  loyal  member 
01  the  Congregational  body. 

It  has  been  a  teaching  church  and  while  it  may 
have  lacked  some  of  the  warmth  and  fervor  of  the 
Methodists,  while  it  may  have  been  less  tenacious 
of  its  doctrinal  positions  than  the  Presbyterian 
Church,  it  has  effectively  construed  the  religious  life 
in  terms  of  education,  seeking  to  lead  men  to  know 


THE  CONGREGATIONAL  PART  113 

Him  who  is  the  truth,  that  knowing  Him  they  might 
be  made  free  from  all  that  hurts  and  hinders  life. 
Time  would  fail  me  to  tell  of  all  of  the  less  famous 
colleges  and  academies  established  by  the  people  of 
this  church,  north,  south,  east  and  west,  each  gather- 
ing its  pupils  to  confer  upon  them  those  benefits 
which  belong  both  to  the  life  that  now  is  and  to  the 
life  which  is  to  come. 

In  the  fourth  place,  this  church  has  been  notable 
for  its  missionary  spirit  and  zeal.  The  first  mis- 
sionary organization  in  this  country  to  send  the 
gospel  to  heathen  lands  was  the  "  American  Board 
of  Foreign  Missions, '  which  resulted  from  the  Hay 
Stack  prayer  meeting  at  Williams  College  more  than 
a  century  ago.  The  largest  gifts  per  capita  for  the 
work  of  foreign  missions  are  made  by  the  Congre- 
gationalists,  excepting  only  that  little  group  of 
Christians  known  as  Moravians,  whose  warm 
and  generous  missionary  zeal  has  exceeded  that  of 
any  other  church  in  Christendom. 

And  some  of  the  most  useful  and  famous  mission- 
aries in  the  foreign  field  have  been  of  this  faith. 
In  many  lands  their  work  has  been  nothing  less 
than  epoch-making — John  Eliot,  the  apostle  to  the 
Indians  and  Cyrus  Hamlin  in  Turkey,  Hiram  Bing- 
ham  of  Hawaii  and  Robert  A.  Hume  of  India, 
Arthur  H.  Smith  of  China  and  James  H.  de  Forest 
of  Japan,  men  with  the  hearts  of  saints  and  the 
minds  of  statesmen. 


114  OUR   TOTAL   CHRISTIANITY 

This  church  was  the  first  to  organize  a  foreign 
missionary  society  and  the  first  also  to  organize  a 
home  missionary  society  for  the  evangelization  of 
our  own  land.  It  was  the  first  to  undertake  the 
education  of  the  freedmen  at  the  close  of  the  Civil 
War — a  comparison  of  statistics  a  few  years  ago 
showed  that  it  had  put  more  money  into  Christian 
schools  in  the  South  than  all  the  other  denomina- 
tions combined.  It  was  the  first  to  introduce  Chris- 
tian education  in  Utah,  making  it  a  potent  instru- 
ment there  to  offset  the  influence  of  Mormonism. 

Its  scholars  have  taken  high  place  in  making 
translations  of  the  scriptures  into  foreign  languages 
for  missionary  work.  Hiram  Bingham  reduced  to 
writing  the  entire  language  of  the  Gilbert  Islanders 
in  Micronesia  and  made  a  translation  of  the  entire 
Bible  for  their  instruction.  In  all.  twenty-seven 
languages  have  been  reduced  to  writing  by  mis- 
sionaries of  the  American  Board  and  one  hundred 
and  eighty  translations  of  the  Bible  into  other 
tongues  have  been  made  by  their  hands  and  brains 
for  the  extension  of:  the  influence  oi~  the  Gospel  of 
Christ, 

And  with  all  its  intellectual  breadth  which  has 
sometimes  disturbed  our  mora  conservative  breth- 
ern,  with  all  its  apparent  lack  of  close-knit  organi- 
zation, the  missionary  spirit  of  the  Congregational 
body  has  been  so  real  and  so  warm  that  it  has  been 
an  evangelizing  church.  How  many  of  the  great 
historic  revivals  and  of  the  mighty  leaders  in  wide- 


THE  CONGREGATIONAL  PART  115 

spread  religious  movements  have  come  from  this 
branch  of  Christ's  church.  Jonathan  Edwards  more 
than  any  other  man  was  responsible  for  "the  great 
awakening'  in  the  Eighteenth  Century.  Charles 
G.  Finney  of  Oberlin  was  the  one  man  who  did 
more  than  any  other  to  promote  the  religious  awak- 
ening which  came  in  the  decades  preceding  the  Civil 
War.  Dwight  L.  Moody  was  regarded  as  the  most 
successful  evangelist  in  the  last  third  of  the  Nine- 
teenth Century.  In  noble  evangelism  it  would  be 
difficult  to  name  three  men  who  have  accom- 
plished more  for  our  country  than  Edwards,  Fin- 
ney and  Moody,  all  of  them  life-long  Congregation- 
alists. 

This  branch  of  the  Church  has  furnished  other 
widely  known  religious  leaders — Francis  E.  Clark, 
founder  and  head  of  the  Christian  Endeavor 
movement,  has  been  all  these  years  a  Congregational 
minister.  R.  J.  Campbell  of  London  is  at  the  head 
of  one  of  the  most  significant  religious  movements 
of  the  Twentieth  Century,  and  however  wTe  may  dis- 
agree with  his  theology,  or  deplore  some  of  his 
eccentric  methods,  he  is  a  force  to  be  reckoned  with. 
And  other  leaders  whose  later  work  may  seem  less 
satisfying  illustrate  the  power  of  this  branch  of 
the  Church  to  develop  leadership.  Benjamin  Fay 
Mills,  for  many  years  a  most  successful  evangelist. 
was  ordained  as  a  Congregational  minister,  and  was 
for  a  long  time  a  member  with  us.  Mrs.  Mary 
Baker  G.  Eddy,  the  founder  of  Christian  Science, 


116  OUR   TOTAL   CHRISTIANITY 

was  the  product  and  in  early  life  a  member  of  our 
branch  of  the  Church.  Its  missionary  spirit  and  its 
intellectual  breadth  have  combined  to  give  the  Con- 
gregational body  a  certain  genius  for  the  develop- 
ment of  widely  influential  religious  leaders.  Its 
men  and  women,  strong  and  free,  constantly  com- 
pelled to  manage  their  own  affairs  have  had  a  way 
of  moving  to  the  front. 

It  has  shown  the  same  missionary  zeal  in  all  the 
great  reforms.  The  real  beginning  of  the  temper- 
ance movement  in  America  as  a  distinct  effort  dates 
from  the  series  of  sermons  preached  against  the  evil 
of  intemperance  in  New  England  by  Lyman  Beecher 
at  a  time  when  tippling  was  common  both  with  the 
ministers  and  the  laity  of  the  evangelical  churches. 
In  the  early  agitation  against  slavery  few  more  con- 
spicuous figures  are  to  be  found  than  those  of  Henry 
Ward  Beecher,  Leonard  Bacon  and  Harriet  Beecher 
Stowe.  The  first  social  settlement  to  transplant  liv- 
ing Christianity  into  the  less  favored  section  of 
a  large  city  by  sending  a  group  of  cultured  men 
and  women  to  live  there  was  the  Andover  House 
in  Boston — now  the  South  End  House — taking  its 
name  originally  from  the  fact  that  Andover  Sem- 
inary stood  behind  it.  And  one  of  the  most  useful 
men  in  that  work  today  is  Graham  Taylor  in  the 
Chicago  Commons,  a  professor  in  one  of  our  semi- 
naries. The  earliest  institutional  churches  to 
achieve  success  along  the  line  of  varied  efforts  were 


THE  CONGKEGATIONAL  PAKT  117 

Berkeley  Temple  in  Boston,  the  Tabernacle  in  Jer- 
sey City  and  the  Fourth  Congregational  Church 
of  Hartford.  And  in  every  form  of  good  work  that 
same  missionary  zeal,  cherished  and  handed  on,  has 
found  some  useful  expression. 

We  have  spent  these  evenings  looking  upon  the 
distinctive  contributions  made  by  these  various 
denominations  to  that  larger  Christianity  in  which 
we  all  alike  believe.  We  have  been  happy  to  find 
in  other  denominations  elements  of  strength  and 
points  of  excellence  which  are  not  conspicious  in 
our  own.  We  are  glad  that  these  various  notes  are 
being  struck  by  men  of  different  moods  and  tem- 
peraments, of  different  tradition  and  training,  in 
order  that  the  fuller,  richer  volume  of  worship  and 
of  service  may  thereby  become  possible.  Let  every 
man  stand  up  in  his  own  chosen  place  and  say  with 
new  gladness  of  heart  "Other  sheep  He  has  which 
are  not  of  this  fold — them  also  He  will  bring.' 

We  have  in  this  day  a  generous  supply  of  religious 
tolerance — we  are  not  fighting  our  fellow  Christians 
in  the  other  camps — but  we  need  a  fuller  measure 
of  actual  and  effective  unity.  We  need  to  exchange 
"the  poor  charity  of  mutual  forbearance"  for  "the 
benign  consciousness  of  inward  sympathy  and  active 
co-operation.'  In  the  smaller  communities  the 
struggling  rivalry  of  the  churches  sometimes  crowds 
out  the  usefulness  of  the  church.  As  a  wise  man 
once  said,  "Effective  blows  are  not  struck  with  ex- 


118  OUB   TOTAL   CHRISTIANITY 

tended  fingers,  but  with  the  solid  fist.  We  may 
threaten  the  devil  with  the  Baptist  finger  or  the 
Episcopal  finger,  with  the  Roman  Catholic  finger  or 
the  Methodist  finger,  and  he  faces  the  assault  with 
great  serenity;  but  when  our  total  Christianity 
comes  to  make  an  undivided  assault,  he  may  be  led 
to  meditate  upon  retreat.' 

This  finer  and  firmer  unity  will  not  be  attained 
by  the  harsh  suppression  of  differences,  but  by  the 
full  development  of  the  distinctive  contributions 
which  each  branch  of  the  Mighty  Vine  of  Chris- 
tian organization  is  making  to  the  aggregate  result. 
1  'Sink  deeply  into  the  inmost  life  of  any  Christian 
faith  and  you  will  touch  the  ground  of  them  all.' 
The  city  that  hath  foundations,  is  surrounded  by 
walls  great  and  high,  but  they>are  pierced  by  many 
gates  of  entrance,  three  on  every  side.  And  when 
we  enter  that  city  of  God,  we  shall  find  that  the 
various  guests  of  the  divine  bounty,  though  fed  at 
separate  tables  have  all  been  fed  upon  the  same 
bread  of  life  and  their  lips  have  all  been  touched 
alike  with  the  same  wine  of  remembrance. 

The  apostle  of  old  was  in  the  spirit  on  the  Lo  :d's 
Day,  and  he  heard  a  voice    from    heaven '  saying, 
"What  thou  seest,  write  in  a  book  and' send  it  unto 
the  seven  churches.'     We  all  recognize  the  fact  that 
'Not  to  one  church  .alone,,,  but  seven 
The  voice  prophetic  spake  from  heaven 
And  unto  each  the  promise  came 
Diversified,   but  still  the   same." 


THE  CONGREGATIONAL  PART  119 

"We  may  in  our  differing  tastes  as  to  ritual  and 
polity,  and  in  our  varying  interpretations  of  the 
eternal  mystery,  be  as  distinct  as  the  fingers  of  the 
hand.  But  we  may  also  in  that  suggestive  and  use- 
ful variety  be  so  knit  together  and  held  within  the 
power  of  a  common  passion  for  righteousness  and 
peace  and  joy  that,  in  a  more  splendid  unity  of  the 
Spirit  we  shall  go  forth  conquering  and  to  conquer. 

March  13,  1910. 


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